PHP date format /Date(1365004652303-0500)/

Question

I am calling an API from where I am getting date /Date(1365004652303-0500)/, I don\'t understand what format this is. How is this date format called? I was not

Answer 1

Baba's answer is very helpful, yet it does not cover 3 cases I need:

• The timestamp may be negative
• The timestamp may be less than 10 digits
• GMT offset may be missing.

This is what I use for getting the timestamp:

$date_string = '/Date(-594262800300+0100)/';
preg_match('/([+-]?\d+)([+-]\d{4})?/', $date_string, $matches);
$timestamp = $matches[1] / 1000;
$hours = $matches[2] * 36; // Get the seconds
return $timestamp + $hours;

Again, as Ghigo noted this is not correct if the offset contains minutes, but it works for my case.