I have a precise date of 1/1/2020 00:00:00 America/Los_Angeles time that I want to convert into a UNIX timestamp. Many answers out there want to set a default timezone using date_default_timezone_set before inserting the string into strtotime() function. But I do not want to mess with the default timezone of the server (which is probably UTC).
Is there anything wrong with doing strtotime("1/1/2020 00:00:00 America/Los_Angeles") to get my timestamp?
I get the correct UNIX value this way. It's just, there's nothing in the docs to indicate this is valid.
As your time str has time zone, there is no need to set the default time zone. But when you want to print it, you need to set default timezone.
php > echo date_default_timezone_get();
UTC
php > echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s",strtotime("1/1/2020 00:00:00 America/Los_Angeles"));
2020-01-01 08:00:00
php > echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s",strtotime("1/1/2020 00:00:00"));
2020-01-01 00:00:00