Find the time-zone & local time of your website visitors with PHP

Continuing our series where we had discussed why it’s helpful to show the content on your website or app based on the user’s local time. Here, we will use PHP to find the time zone (using the API) and use it to compute the local time.

<php

// API endpoint
$ipAddress = "8.8.8.8";
$apiUrl = "https://ipapi.co/".$ipAddress."/json/";

// Fetch the data from the API
$response = file_get_contents($apiUrl);

// Check if the request was successful
if ($response !== false) {
    // Decode the JSON data
    $data = json_decode($response, true);

    // Check if the 'timezone' key exists in the decoded data
    if (isset($data['timezone'])) {
        $visitorTimezone = $data['timezone'];

        // Output the timezone
        echo "Visitor's Timezone: $visitorTimezone<br>";

        // Calculate and output the local time of the visitor
        $dateTime = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone($visitorTimezone));
        echo "Visitor's Local Time: " . $dateTime->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
    } else {
        echo $response;
    }
} else {
    echo "Error accessing the API.";
}

?>

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