How to get the names and abbreviations of a time zone in PHP?

Question

Starting with a time zone identifier, such as "America/Los_Angeles", how do you find the names and abbreviations of that time zone in PHP? For example:

'PST', 'Pacific Standard Time', 'PDT', 'Pacific Daylight Time'

If I could get only the short abbreviation ('PST' and 'PDT'), that would be ok.

I've looked at DateTimeZone::listAbbreviations(), and tried inspecting that to see which correspond with my id, however for America/Los_Angeles, it finds "PST", "PDT", "PPT" and "PWT" which is slightly curious.

According to https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/northamerica#L146, it looks like the "W" and "P" in PWT and PPT stand for "war" and "peace" respectively. — gvl, Jun 21 '17 at 21:33

score 15 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 19 '11 at 14:27

15

hope this will help you

<?php
    date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Sofia');
    echo date_default_timezone_get(); // Europe/Sofia
    echo ' => '.date('T'); // => EET
?>

answered Mar 19 '11 at 14:27

Teneff

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2

Thanks, but that only goes half way. I already have the id ("Europe/Sofia"), and I'm looking for the name of the time zone itself ("Eastern European Time"/"Eastern European Summer Time") – nickf Mar 19 '11 at 14:34

Joe L. · Answer 2 · 2013-11-21T18:56:18.767

11

I hope this helps:

function get_timezone_abbreviation($timezone_id)
{
    if($timezone_id){
        $abb_list = timezone_abbreviations_list();

        $abb_array = array();
        foreach ($abb_list as $abb_key => $abb_val) {
            foreach ($abb_val as $key => $value) {
                $value['abb'] = $abb_key;
                array_push($abb_array, $value);
            }
        }

        foreach ($abb_array as $key => $value) {
            if($value['timezone_id'] == $timezone_id){
                return strtoupper($value['abb']);
            }
        }
    }
    return FALSE;
}

get_timezone_abbreviation('America/New_York');

And you get:

EDT

edited Nov 21 '13 at 18:56

answered Oct 17 '12 at 16:32

Joe L.

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14

It is not working properly for `echo get_timezone_abbreviation('Asia/Kolkata');` – Debesh Nayak Aug 04 '16 at 05:11
@DebeshNayak What version of PHP are you using? – Joe L. Aug 05 '16 at 14:39
@DebeshNayak, I just tested in several versions of PHP and it works. Please take a look: http://take.ms/Pp0Ws – Joe L. Aug 05 '16 at 14:52

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 15 '15 at 11:13

8

Hope this will help you

<?php
$dateTime = new DateTime();
$dateTime->setTimeZone(new DateTimeZone('America/Havana'));
echo $dateTime->format('T');
?>

answered Oct 15 '15 at 11:13

ajay p

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Timo Huovinen · Answer 4 · 2015-09-22T13:13:58.930

The thing is, a timezone name depends on the time of the year, for example in the winter it's CET, in the summer it's CEST.

We can get the name of the timezone by using the current date and time.

$timezone = 'Pacific/Midway';
$dt = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone($timezone));
$abbreviation = $dt->format('T'); // SST

it only supports the timezones that php knows, it didn't know what "Pacific Standard Time" was.

Here you can see how it switches between CET and CEST

    $t = new CDateTime('2015-09-22 11:00', new DateTimeZone('CET'));
    $t->format('T'); // CEST

    $t = new CDateTime('2015-12-22 11:00', new DateTimeZone('CET'));
    $t->format('T'); // CET

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 19 '11 at 14:58

1

Looks like Symphony has methods for that, e.g. select_timezone_tag. You might check their source code to see how it's done.

answered Mar 19 '11 at 14:58

JRL

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How to get the names and abbreviations of a time zone in PHP?

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