Parsing strings for date time information:

<?php
  $dt 
= new DateTime("2018-03-08 08:43:57");
?>

This function will not return the timestamp as an integer, but instead returns a DateTime object, which you can access (as string) through:


<?php
  $dt 
= new DateTime("2018-03-08 08:44:12");
  echo 
$dt->format'U' ), "\n";
?>
Output
1520498652

The DateTime class is what you can do the really cool things with.