On the Builder.com.au website today, there's a quick new tutorial on grabbing the correct time for a user's "home" rather than the server's time.

PHP comes with an extensive catalog of date and time functions, all designed to let you easily retrieve temporal information, massage it into a format you require, and either use it in a calculation or display it to the user. However, if you'd like to do something more complicated, things get much, much hairier

To make things easier, they enlist the service of the PEAR Date package to help bridge the gap between the time zones faster. They give some of the basics of using the package before actually getting into the time zone conversion. The code is pretty straight-forward and they even include other simple tips like how to calculate the GMT offset and how to add and subtract timespans.

On the Builder.com website, there's a new tutorial demonstrating how to use the PEAR Date class to make switching between time zones a snap.

To be fair, PHP has built-in time zone functions to help with this, but these aren't particularly intuitive and require a fair amount of time to get used to. A quicker alternative is to use the PEAR Date class, which comes with built-in support for time zones and is, by far, the simplest way to perform these conversions.

This tutorial will teach you how to convert temporal values between time zones with the PEAR Date class. It assumes that you have a working Apache and PHP installation and that the PEAR Date class has been correctly installed.

They go with a few simple examples to introduce you to how things work:

• just taking in and echoing back out the date
• taking in the date and echoing it back out in a different format
• making a simple time zone conversion
• convert the timestamp to local time
• finding the offset for the time stamp from GMT
• adding and subtracting time stamps