Question

I have a jQuery script that returns a date as:

Wed Nov 09 2011 16:30:00 GMT-0700 (MST)

How could I convert that into unix timestamp? I was looking at mktime() but I’m not really understanding it completely. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you’re using PHP 5.2, try the DateTime class, eg

$dt = new DateTime("Wed Nov 09 2011 16:30:00 GMT-0700 (MST)");
$ts = $dt->getTimestamp();

Otherwise, try strtotime(), eg

$ts = strtotime("Wed Nov 09 2011 16:30:00 GMT-0700 (MST)");
echo date("r", $ts);

For me, this outputs

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:30:00 +1100

Note that the date() function is local timezone aware