php - Output of date() and DateTime::format() differ, DateTime::format() ignores timezone
I've set the timezone of PHP to 'Europe/Berlin' in php.ini, which should be +1 to UTC (in winter).
When I output a Unix timestamp (UTC) to the user (with Apache and browser) by using date(), the timezone is used correctly. When I output the same timestamp with DateTime::format(), there is no timezone applied, until I set it explicitly with DateTime::setTimezone().
See the following example code:
<?php
$now = time();
// Verify Timezone
$tz = ini_get('date.timezone');
echo 'Timezone: ' . $tz . '<br>';
// Using date
echo 'date(): ' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $now) . '<br>';
// Using DateTime
$dt = new DateTime('@' . $now);
echo 'DateTime1: ' . $dt->format('Y-m-d H:i:s') . '<br>';
// Setting DateTime timezone explicitly
$dt->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('Europe/Berlin'));
echo 'DateTime2: ' . $dt->format('Y-m-d H:i:s') . '<br>';
Output:
Timezone: Europe/Berlin
date(): 2020-12-09 15:31:32
DateTime1: 2020-12-09 14:31:32
DateTime2: 2020-12-09 15:31:32
Why is that? I can't see any hints in the docs that DateTime::format() ignores the timezone set in php.ini by default.
Answer
Solution:
As @El_Vanja pointed out in the comments, the DateTime constuctor ignores the timezone when being set by unix timestamp (see docs)
The ::format() method takes into regard what is set in the object (=UTC) and not what is set in php.ini.