PHP strtotime function - not safe to rely on system's timezone?

Question

I want to convert a date - 2012-05-25 to the unix timestamp. When i'm using the strtotime() function, it says

PHP Warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Asia/Calcutta' for 'IST/5.0/no DST' instead in /var/www/html/__modules/tickets/library/Notification/RD_time.php on line 323.

Please help me out. I need to flush these reports by tonight.

Answer 1

Just do what it says in the warning and use date_default_timezone_set

For example:

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

Answer 2

You can add the following at the beginning of your code:

date_default_timezone_set('Africa/Lagos');//or change to whatever timezone you want

If you want to make this one time, you can put the timezone in your php.ini file. You can search for date.timezone, You should have a block like this in your php.ini file:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = Africa/Lagos

Be sure to restart the server (service httpd restart on linux).

The list of timezones can be found here http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php.