PHP Timestamp Hell - Converting ISO8601 timestamps

I hate messing with dates and times in all languages so I hope this helps someone speed along their day:

    function tstamptotime($tstamp) {
        // converts ISODATE to unix date
        // 1984-09-01T14:21:31Z
       sscanf($tstamp,"%u-%u-%uT%u:%u:%uZ",$year,$month,$day,
        $hour,$min,$sec);
        $newtstamp=mktime($hour,$min,$sec,$month,$day,$year);
        return $newtstamp;
    }                   

It converts an ISO8601 timestamp to a unix epoch (seconds past whenever unix started counting seconds).

Enjoy.

Comments

[Todd]

Yeah, I agree, fiddling with date conversions stinks. At least you didn't have to check your server to see whether it observes daylight savings time (only works on Linux, Windows barfs, btw).

[Neil Wattam]

Wow cheers, just what i was looking for. I also find all these time formats a royal pain in the back side, and a xml feed i use to keep a project of mine running desided to change from a unix time stamp to the ISO format, messing my entire project up...

All working again now...

Thanks

[Andrew Somervell]

Thank you Idealog + Google!

[Olivier G.]

Seems that strtotime() makes it also.

[djodin]

Thanks! Handy function.

[Mike]

This was really helpful, thanks.

[jason]

That was extremely useful! Thanks

[Bradford]

Thanks! This was very helpful.

[Darren]

That's saved me about 3 hours of pulling my hair out :) Thanks!