John Davidson

Message:

I am trying to solve this exercise in PHP from a Python book

Write a program that converts a time from one time zone to another. The user enters the time
in the usual American way, such as 3:48pm or 11:26am. The first time zone the user enters
is that of the original time and the second is the desired time zone. The possible time zones
are Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific.
Time: 11:48pm
Starting zone: Pacific
Ending zone: Eastern
2:48am

Struggling to come with a logic to solve it.

At the moment I am thinking about

IF AM

    Switch

       16 different cases

IF PM

    Switch

       16 different cases     

but it seems a stupid way of doing it.

Any ideas?

---

My Answer:
One way to approach this problem is to convert the input time to a standard format (24-hour format) and then calculate the time difference between the two time zones. Here's a possible solution:

php

function convertTime($time, $startZone, $endZone) {
$time = date("H:i", strtotime($time)); // Convert time to 24-hour format

$timeZones = array(
"Eastern" => 0,
"Central" => 1,
"Mountain" => 2,
"Pacific" => 3
);

$timeDifference = $timeZones[$endZone] - $timeZones[$startZone];

$newTime = date("H:i", strtotime("$time + $timeDifference hours"));

return $newTime;
}

$inputTime = "11:48pm";
$startZone = "Pacific";
$endZone = "Eastern";

$newTime = convertTime($inputTime, $startZone, $endZone);

echo $newTime;

?>


This code snippet defines a function `convertTime` that takes the input time, starting time zone, and ending time zone as parameters. It converts the input time to a 24-hour format, calculates the time difference between the two time zones, and then adds the time difference to the input time to get the new time in the desired time zone.

You can modify this code to handle different time zones or input formats as needed.