advanced patterns when using PHP's strtotime with timezones in Laravel 8
I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. I'm learning this framework and I'm getting frustrated with I'm wondering if anyone has experience with I'm experiencing an scenario with `strtotime` when converting date strings that include timezone information in my Laravel 8 application... When I call `strtotime` on a string like `"2023-10-01 12:00:00 -0400"`, it seems to return an incorrect timestamp that doesn't account for the timezone offset. Here's the code snippet I'm using: ```php $dateString = '2023-10-01 12:00:00 -0400'; $timestamp = strtotime($dateString); echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $timestamp); ``` I'm expecting the output to be `2023-10-01 12:00:00`, corresponding to the EDT timezone. Instead, it outputs `2023-10-01 16:00:00`, which is in UTC. I've checked the PHP version, and I'm using PHP 8.0. I also tried setting the timezone using `date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');` before calling `strtotime`, but it didn't change the output. Is there a specific way to handle date strings with timezone offsets in this version of PHP, or am I missing some configuration in Laravel? Any insights would be appreciated! I'm developing on macOS with Php. Am I missing something obvious? I'm working on a service that needs to handle this. What's the best practice here? I'm working in a Linux environment. Any advice would be much appreciated.