How do I get the local system time in PHP?

Question

Hello,

I'm writing a PHP system and I need to get the system time. Not the GMT time or the time specific to a timezone, but the same system time that is used by the CRON system. I have a CRON job that runs every day at midnight and I want to show on a webpage how long will it take before it runs again.

For example: Right now it is 6pm on my system clock. I run the code:

$timeLeftUntilMidnight = date("H:i", strtotime("tomorrow") - strtotime("now"));

The result, however, is "3:00" instead of "6:00". If I run

date("H:i", strtotime("tomorrow"));

It returns 0:00, which is correct. But if I run

date("H:i", strtotime("now"));

It returns 21:00, even though the correct should be 18:00.

Thanks.

Answer 1

php's time will return the system time. you can format it with date

if you just want to display the time in the local time of the visitor maybe you're better off using a little javascript

Answer 2

time()

will give you the current system timestamp.

Manual

Returns the current time measured in the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).

Answer 3

You can get the date/time of the server on which PHP is running using the time() function -- it'll return a timestamp, that corresponds to the current datetime.

It's the system time, on that server -- the same as used by cron.

Answer 4

How about using the localtime function.

Answer 5

If you want the GMT time you may want to use gmtstrftime(), which will give you the system time but as in GMT. There's more info at http://us2.php.net/gmstrftime.

Answer 6

If you are after a formatted date:

date ('d/m/y h:i:s'); 

will do the trick, there is no need to pass time() into date as it will default to the current system time if no second parameter is supplied.

for more formatting options see here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Otherwise you can just use

time()

To get you the current unix timestamp as others have mentioned.