Question

I am pulling a feed from Google Calendar. It has the event start time in this format:

StartDate: 2011-06-25T18:00:00.000-05:00

I understand that the -05:00 is the timezone offset. I need the above to get put into the mySQL database in GMT time. I was just reading about date() and gmdate() but I’m afraid I’m pretty new at this and I don’t seem to be getting the results I need.

Right now the above code ends up being this in my datetime colum in mySQL:

2011-06-25 18:00:00

I need the above to be:

2011-06-25 23:00:00

But I need a dynamic way to do this so any user with a different timezone will get the correct results-IE: I need the function to be smart enough to read the timezone offset and make the needed changes regardless of the offset. I’m hoping there is a PHP function that does this already?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

If you use strtotime, you can do this:

<?
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$date = strtotime('2011-06-25T18:00:00.000-05:00');
echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s',$date);

This results on my system in:

2011-06-25 23:00:00