Adjusting timezones

[Jesdisciple]

I'm trying to compare the current time with one from another (SVN) server, set in GMT and formatted as 'D, d M Y H:i:s e', but I'm having problems getting a GMT/UTC timestamp from the supplied date-string. Unfortunately my deployment server is running PHP 5.1.6, so I can't take advantage of DateTime::getTimestamp which would work perfectly for this. So I've pieced together a solution which I think should be portable across PHP 5.1+ installations but would appreciate feedback from anyone interested in giving it. (I started typing this as a question, but I'm not totally confident about the answer I formulated.)

Here's the code, where $dateString is the date retrieved from the other server.

$dateTime = new DateTime($dateString);
$timezone = new DateTimeZone(date_default_timezone_get());
$offset = timezone_offset_get($timezone, $dateTime);
$timestamp = strtotime($dateString) - $offset;
echo $dateString . '<br />' . PHP_EOL;/* These should be identical, except the timezone which my PHP insists on showing as "System/Localtime" below. */
echo date('D, d M Y H:i:s e', $timestamp) . '<br />' . PHP_EOL;
echo $timestamp . '<br />' . PHP_EOL;

Thanks for any input.

[jscheuer1]

Maybe:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserve...les.server.php

Scroll down that page to:

'REQUEST_TIME'
The timestamp of the start of the request. Available since PHP 5.1.0.

[Jesdisciple]

Err, I guess I should have stated my problem at the first of that first sentence:

I'm having problems getting a GMT/UTC timestamp from the supplied date-string.

(For that matter, now that I have re-read my post I notice that the current time is not relevant to the issue at all. The time to be compared with that from the server is when a local file was last modified, but neither is that directly relevant to this question.)

[bluewalrus]

So maybe http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.filemtime.php

[Jesdisciple]

*facepalm* Sorry, no offense - I just can't believe you both got sidetracked by the "local filesystem" portion of this feature. I apparently explained my problem very poorly so I'll try again, with more background info this time. I left it out because normally I consider it fluff but I think it clears some things up in this case.

I'm developing the Kuva project and recently adopted its inactive dependency phpsvnclient. I'm trying to make Kuva able to update all of a site's components via SVN, hence the dependency. phpsvnclient supplies the paths of its source tree along with a last-modified date. I want to convert that date into a timestamp on my server; I cannot access the files on the Google Code server to manually find this timestamp. The code I supplied above is my (hypothetical) solution for converting to the timestamp from which I can subtract the local last-modified (returned from filemtime).

[Jesdisciple]

(bumpety) Is there really no cleaner way to convert a date-string to a timestamp?