Set time zone for strtotime function
<p>I'm setting a daily countdown to a deadline date. The code works fine.</p>

<p>The only issue is that, according to the <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php" rel="nofollow">PHP Manual</a>, the function will use the default time zone:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Each parameter of this function uses the default time zone unless a time zone is specified in that parameter.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I need to be able to specify the time zone.</p>

<p>The sections I've read in the manual are not entirely clear how to do this.</p>

<p>Here's my code:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;?php
 $date = strtotime("September 30, 2016 11:59 PM");
 $remaining = $date - time(); // number of seconds remaining
 $days_remaining = floor($remaining / 86400);
 $hours_remaining = floor(($remaining % 86400) / 3600); // display final 5 days only
 echo "$days_remaining Days Remaining";
 ?&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>Is there a simple way to integrate the US Pacific Time Zone to the code above?</p>

<p>My guess is to make this the first line of code:</p>

<pre><code>date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');
</code></pre>

<p>But I'm not sure this will work and I don't want to change the time zone for other scripts.</p>

<p>I'm open to alternative methods for achieving this goal.</p>