Question

I’m fetching dates from MySQL as strings (Y-m-d format). I need to display a chart using Highcharts. Highcharts uses javascript Date.UTC function:

Return the number of milliseconds between a specified date and
midnight January 1 1970.

data: [
    [Date.UTC(1970,  9, 27), 0   ],
    [Date.UTC(1970, 10, 10), 0.6 ],
    [Date.UTC(1970, 10, 18), 0.7 ],
    [Date.UTC(1970, 11,  2), 0.8 ],
    [Date.UTC(1970, 11,  9), 0.6 ],

But i’d like to avoid javascript and do in in PHP (assigning a JSON object – the chart – to the page itself). What’s the equivalent of Date.UTC function in PHP (regardless the server datezone)?

$date      = '2012-07-07';
$millisecs = 1000 * unix_timestap_utc_regardless_server_zone($date);

Answer 1

I would use

date_default_timezone_set('UTC');    
$today = date(getdate());

That would set $today as the date.

EDIT: Niclas is also right, this is just how I would do it.

EDIT 2: You can replace getdate() with a valid timestamp in PHP, if you like…

EDIT 3: Sorry… Misunderstanding… use strtotime() to make a valid timestamp!