datetime - PHP strtotime() function that accepts a format?

Question

strtotime() in PHP works great if you can provide it with a date format it understands and can convert, but for example you give it a UK date it fails to give the correct unix timestamp.

Is there any PHP function, official or unofficial, that can accept a format variable that tells the function in which format the date and time is being passed?

The closest I have come to doing this is a mixture of date_parse_from_format() and mktime()

// Example usage of the function I'm after
//Like the date() function but in reverse
$timestamp = strtotimeformat("03/05/2011 16:33:00", "d/m/Y H:i:s");

Answer 1

If you have PHP 5.3:

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y H:i:s', '03/05/2011 16:33:00');
echo $date->getTimestamp();