Strange behaviour of date()
2. Januar 2009
comments feedRecently I used time and date functions to calculate an ETA and remaining running time for a longer running script. When showing the remaining time using the date() function I encountered some strange behaviour:
According to the documentation date() expects the second parameter to be a UNIX Timestamp, which - as we all know - starts at 01.01.1970 00:00:00. Meaning when you print out date('H:i', 0) you'd expect to get 00:00. For some reason this is not the case:
php > print date('H:i', 0);
01:00
Does anyone know why this is the case? In my script I did a workaround by simply substracting one hour, which isn't the best style obviously.
(Note: I used the php interactive shell you can run by executing php -a to print out the date)
4 comments
Dominik Jungowski
08.01.2009, 11:18 o'clock
Well, we've tried it on several servers and always got the same result. The datetime was ok, according to the server settings. We haven't tried date_default_timezone_set() though, gonna try it out soon.
Johannes Schlüter
23.01.2009, 01:57 o'clock
date expects a Unix Time Stamp, Unix time stamps are counted from 1970/01/01 00:00:00 GMT (!), Germany is GMT+1
Dominik Jungowski
31.01.2009, 12:26 o'clock
@Ralf: Well, the timezone is correct:
php > print(date_default_timezone_get());
Europe/Berlin
@Johannes: That seems reasonable, thanks!
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Ralf Eggert
02.01.2009, 18:41 o'clock
Just a wild guess: check your time zone settings. Just play around with date_default_timezone_set() and check results again.
greetinx,
Ralf