RSS Date Problem

[khendar]

I'm working on a script which reads an RSS feed, uses LastRSS to parse the feed and then inserts records into a calendar application using the pubDate field as the appointment date.

The problem I am having is getting the timezone on the calendar record correct. I can read the date from the feed in any format I wish, but the calendar only takes Unix Epoch timestamps, which are UTC. When I read the feed pubDate in as U and insert it to the calendar the dates are off by the timezone offset.

How can I determine the timezone offset based on the feed data, and adjust the timestamp that gets inserted into the calendar accordingly ?

[NogDog]

If you are reading in a standard RFC [2]822 date ("Sat, 07 Sep 2002 09:42:31 CST" format), you should be able to convert that to a PHP UNIX time integer via [man]strtotime/man, e.g.:

$timeUnixSeconds = strtotime($rssDateTimeValue);

If your calendar function just wants that PHP time value, you're all set. If it's looking for a date string of some sort, you can use the [man]gmdate/man function to output the value as desired, e.g.:

$dateTimeGmt = gmdate('r', $timeUnixSeconds);