How to I accurately get current UTC time via strtotime?

Question

In PHP, how do I get the current time, in UTC, without hard coding knowledge of where my hosting provider is?

For example, I tried the following:

time() + strtotime('January 1, 2000')-strtotime('January 1, 2000 UTC')

and find that it reports a time that is one hour ahead of actual UTC time. I tried this on two different hosting providers in two different time zones with the same results.

Is there a reliable (and, hopefully, cleaner) way to accurately get the UTC time?

I am limited to PHP 4.4.9 so I cannot use the new timezone stuff added to PHP5.

Thanks, in advance.

Answer 1

This seems to work for me. Of course, you'll need to test it on PHP 4 since all of my servers have PHP 5, but the manual claims this should work for PHP 4.

$t = time();
$x = $t+date("Z",$t);
echo strftime("%B %d, %Y @ %H:%M:%S UTC", $x);

First time around, I forgot that the date could change between the call to time() and date().

Answer 2

$time = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
echo $time->format('F j, Y H:i:s');

Answer 3

Does this work for php 4.4.9?

echo gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s', time());

or if you want it for a specific date:

$time = strtotime('January 1, 2000 UTC');
if($time){
    echo gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
}

Answer 4

$utcTtime = gmmktime();
$unixTimestamp = time();

gmmktime: Get Unix timestamp for a GMT date