[php] Get current date, given a timezone in PHP?

I want to get todays date given a time zone in Paul Eggert format(America/New_York) in PHP?

I have created some simple function you can use to convert time to any timezone :

function convertTimeToLocal($datetime,$timezone='Europe/Dublin') {
        $given = new DateTime($datetime, new DateTimeZone("UTC"));
        $given->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone($timezone));
        $output = $given->format("Y-m-d"); //can change as per your requirement
        return $output;
}

If you have access to PHP 5.3, the intl extension is very nice for doing things like this.

Here's an example from the manual:

$fmt = new IntlDateFormatter( "en_US" ,IntlDateFormatter::FULL, IntlDateFormatter::FULL,
    'America/Los_Angeles',IntlDateFormatter::GREGORIAN  );
$fmt->format(0); //0 for current time/date

In your case, you can do:

$fmt = new IntlDateFormatter( "en_US" ,IntlDateFormatter::FULL, IntlDateFormatter::FULL,
        'America/New_York');
 $fmt->format($datetime); //where $datetime may be a DateTime object, an integer representing a Unix timestamp value (seconds since epoch, UTC) or an array in the format output by localtime(). 

As you can set a Timezone such as America/New_York, this is much better than using a GMT or UTC offset, as this takes into account the day light savings periods as well.

Finaly, as the intl extension uses ICU data, which contains a lot of very useful features when it comes to creating your own date/time formats.

<?php
date_default_timezone_set('GMT-5');//Set New York timezone
$today = date("F j, Y")
?>

Set the default time zone first and get the date then, the date will be in the time zone you specify :

<?php 
 date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
 $date= date('m-d-Y') ;
 ?>

http://php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.php