PHP mktime() error

Question

I'm all of a sudden getting the following error on a site that I've done when I import an excel file to MySQL using the Excel_Reader library.

This is the error message that mktime() produces:

Message: mktime() [function.mktime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Asia/Krasnoyarsk' for '7.0/no DST' instead

The error is because of the following line:

$string = date ($format, mktime($hours, $mins,$secs, 
                $dateinfo["mon"], $dateinfo["mday"], $dateinfo["year"]));

I'm currently using PHP version 5.3.1. Is this script not compatible with my PHP version? How can I fix this error?

Answer 1

The error says it all. Relying on system's timezone settings is a bad idea and therefore you 'll need to specify a timezone using one of the following options.

You have three solutions:

1. Set a default timezone in your PHP script using date_default_timezone_set():

    date_default_timezone_set("America/Los_Angeles");
   

2. Use ini_set() to set a default timezone:

    ini_set('date.timezone', 'America/Los_Angeles'); 
   

3. Define it as date.timezone in your php.ini file.

Documentation: date_default_timezone_set() ini_set()

Hope this helps!