Timestamp value of date field always -1 day in the past

[Stefanowitsch]

I was upgrading some date formatting code lines in my projects and noticed a strange behaviour.

I have a date field in the backend which is a classic processwire datetime field. In this field I can set - for example - an event date. For date selecting I am using the HTML5 Datepicker option in the field settings. Besides that I changed none of the fields settings at all.

To display this date in the frontend all i do is:

echo §page->event_date;

However - I need to format this date in multiple ways throughout the whole site. So I need a unix timestamp (for localization of the date).

strtotime($page->event_date);

When I check the timestamp that comes out - it is always exactly 1 day before the date that was set in the date field.

So when selecting "08.06.22" in the date field, the timestamp says "07.06.22"

When I format the date -based on the timestamp- to make it human-readable again I can confirm that the new date is one day in the past...

How is this possible?

[zoeck]

I think this has to do with your time zone ?

Do you have the Language Support module installed?
If yes, go to Administration -> Languages and select the appropriate language

Then edit the "wire--modules--languagesupport--languagesupport-module.json" file and set your locale in "C" (example: de_DE.UTF-8)

 

Can you post a timestamp as an example?

[Stefanowitsch]

32 minutes ago, zoeck said:

I think this has to do with your time zone ?

Do you have the Language Support module installed?
If yes, go to Administration -> Languages and select the appropriate language

Then edit the "wire--modules--languagesupport--languagesupport-module.json" file and set your locale in "C" (example: de_DE.UTF-8)

 

Can you post a timestamp as an example?

My config.php looks like this:

$config->timezone = 'Europe/Berlin';
setlocale(LC_ALL,  'de_DE.utf8', 'de_DE');

I edited the json file in the Backend (with: de_DE.UTF-8).

The timestamp looks like this: 1654898400

When examining this timestamp I get both dates:

GMT: Friday, 10. June 2022 22:00:00
Your time zone: Samstag, 11. Juni 2022 00:00:00 GMT+02:00 DST

It seems that I just ignored that fact that there are two dates shown (always look at the first one).

My $page->testdate field outputs the date like this: 11.06.2022

So this outputs the right date (11. Juni):

<?= strftime("%e. %B", strtotime($page->testdate)); ?>

My problem is that this is deprecated in the future and the new way to do this looks like this:

 <? echo IntlDateFormatter::formatObject( new DateTime($page->testdate), "dd. MMM", 'de_DE'); ?>

This also outputs 11. Juni (correct)

But when using the timestamp I get the wrong date:

<? echo IntlDateFormatter::formatObject( new DateTime('@' . strtotime($page->testdate)), "dd. MMM", 'de_DE' ); ?>

This outputs 10. Juni

[Stefanowitsch]

I found the reason: https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.construct.php

The $timezone parameter and the current timezone are ignored when the $datetime parameter either is a UNIX timestamp (e.g. @946684800) or specifies a timezone (e.g. 2010-01-28T15:00:00+02:00).

So thats why i get the wrong date when using this code here (my timezone gets ignored)

<? echo IntlDateFormatter::formatObject( new DateTime('@' . strtotime($page->testdate)), "dd. MMM", 'de_DE' ); ?>

Even when explicitly setting the timezone inside the DateTime object constructor it gets ignored.