Returns the epoch of the arbitrary date/time string structured as described in the format.

The purpose of this function is to take a formatted date/time and convert it back into seconds since the epoch (January 1st, 1970, at midnight GMT), so that you may do calculations with it, or simply convert it into some other date/time format.

STRPTIME passes the string and format directly to the underlying C library call strptime(3), so check out that manpage for more information. The timezone parameter should be the name of a directory/file in /usr/share/zoneinfo (e.g., America/Chicago or America/New_York).

See Also

STRFTIME()