date - PHP - strtotime, specify timezone

Question

I have a date string, say '2008-09-11'. I want to get a timestamp out of this, but I need to specify a timezone dynamically (rather then PHP default).

So to recap, I have two strings:

$dateStr = '2008-09-11';
$timezone = 'Americas/New_York';

How do I get the timestamp for this?

EDIT: The time of day will be the midnight of that day.... $dateStr = '2008-09-11 00:00:00';

Answer 1

$date = new DateTime($dateStr, new DateTimeZone($timezone));

$timestamp = $date->format('U');