Etc/GMT+(offset) only providing GMT in PHP
<p>According to PHP, the timezone in the format <code>Etc/GMT+(offset)</code> is a <a href="http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.others.php" rel="nofollow">valid timezone</a>. Based on that, I would have assumes that this code would output a series of different timezomes:</p>

<pre><code>$start_date = 'Dec 16, 2011';
$start_time = '09:45:00';
#$utime_zone = 'GMT'; &lt;-- switching to GMT works!
$utime_zone = 'Etc/GMT';

for($i = -12; $i &lt;= 12; $i++){
   $curr = ($i &gt;= 0)?'+'.$i: $i;
   $str = ($start_date . " " . $start_time . " " . $utime_zone.$curr);
   echo $str . ' = ' . strtotime($str).PHP_EOL;
}
</code></pre>

<p>Unfortunately, the strtotime calls are all ignoring the timezone completely.</p>

<p>The output:<br />
<code>Dec 16, 2011 09:45:00 Etc/GMT-12 = 1324028700</code><br />
<code>Dec 16, 2011 09:45:00 Etc/GMT-11 = 1324028700</code><br />
<code>Dec 16, 2011 09:45:00 Etc/GMT-10 = 1324028700</code><br />
<code>...you get the idea.</code></p>

<p>Clearly I have made some assumption about this, but is there an easy way to convert from <code>Etc/GMT+(offset)</code> to a GMT timestamp?</p>
