Question

I am running a service hosted on a server in the US which reads an XML feed that has been created with a local date – currently just the UK, but I want to ensure the service works with all timezones.
My process looks at the date of a post in a feed and compares it with the date/time right now(on the server in the US).
The solution I came up with localises the system to the originator of the feed and then creates a timestamp with which to compare ‘now’ with:

protected function datemath($thedate){

    $currenttimezone = date_default_timezone_get();
    date_default_timezone_set($this->feedtimezone);
    $thedate = mktime substr($thedate,11,2),substr($thedate,14,2),
    substr($thedate,17,2),substr($thedate,3,2),substr($thedate,0,2),
    substr($thedate,6,4));
    date_default_timezone_set($currenttimezone);
    return $thedate;

    }

My question is this… Is this a reasonable way of handling this issue or is there a better, more standardized way that I really should know?

Answer 1

After a bit more checking of other peoples code I see the function

strtotime($thedate);

is a little bit more succinct than using mktime and also allows for different time formats.