Date does not change from UTC PHP

Question

The code below will not give me the time in the timezone I specify. Why

    $dateTimeStr = substr($this->statsGW->fetchLatestDateTime(), 0, -7);
    $defaultTZ = new DateTimeZone("Europe/Rome");
    date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Rome");
    date("H:i",strtotime($dateTimeStr));

Instead it keeps returning the UTC time that is stored in the database and is fetched with the first code.

Answer 1

You need to specify default time zone before get the date.

date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Rome");
$today = getdate();
print_r($today);

You can access any attribute of date object using $today vairable.