How to get the date with timezone offset applied [duplicate]

Question

The following code works and outputs the date for the different offsets:

echo 'Australia/Sydney' . JFactory::getDate('now', 'Australia/Sydney');
echo "<BR>";
echo 'UTC' . JFactory::getDate('now', 'UTC');
echo "<BR>";
echo 'Asia/Jakarta ' . JFactory::getDate('now', 'Asia/Jakarta');

But this code

echo 'Australia/Sydney' . JFactory::getDate('today', 'Australia/Sydney');
echo "<BR>";
echo 'UTC' . JFactory::getDate('today', 'UTC');
echo "<BR>";
echo 'Asia/Jakarta ' . JFactory::getDate('today', 'Asia/Jakarta');

All gives me the same result : 2015-04-29 00:00:00

How can I get Joomla to give me a date with the timezone offset that I select please?

Answer 1

OK so I believe this to be true :)

I was looking for a Joomla answer whereas I needed to use some Joomla and some php to get what I wanted.

JDate works off UTC timezone by default.

So you need to apply your server timezone offset (or user timezone offset) to the date first. That way,

$config = JFactory::getConfig();
$offset = $config->get('offset');
echo $offset;
echo "<br>";
$date = new JDate('today', $offset);
echo $date;
echo "<br>";
$date->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
echo $date;
echo "<br>";

The output of the above for me was: Australia/Melbourne 2015-04-30 00:00:00 2015-04-29 14:00:00

and now I have the UTC offset of today for my server and can use it query data.

Answer 2

It could either be the system timezone: System => Global Configuration => Server => Location Settings

Or that particular user has a different timezone set in the user manager: Users => User Manager => Name => Basic Settings => Time Zone