Carbon：根据输入日期字符串AND timezone返回时间戳

Question

Take someone from Europe/Paris (+02:00) for example.

I want to build a function where I pass in a date and time string ('2016-10-6 06:00 PM') and my time zone identifier ('Europe/Paris'). I want to return the corresponding GMT timestamp.

getTimestamp('2016-10-6 06:00 PM', 'Europe/Paris')

Here is what I have so far:

public function getTimestamp($string, $time_zone)
{
    $c = Carbon::parse($string);
    $c->timezone = new DateTimeZone($time_zone);
    return $c->timestamp;
}

Problem

If a pass a date and time of 2016-10-06 06:00 PM and a time zone of Europe/Paris I get back a UTC timestamp that corresponds to 2016-10-06 06:00 PM GMT.

It should be returning a time of 04:00 GMT because Europe/Paris is two hours ahead.

Question

How do I pass a date and time zone and get back a GMT timestamp with the correct offset.

Answer 1

The parse function allows you to pass in the timezone

public static function parse($time = null, $tz = null)

So just pass it in:

$c = Carbon::parse($string, $time_zone);