I know that this has been asked but my problem is little different i think.. I get the response from a WCF JSON web service..
$reservation->ChIn=substr($reservation->ChIn,6,-10);
This extracts the timestamp but wastes the +0300 timezone info.
Then calling $chi=getdate($reservation->ChIn);
However that may have a problem because even if i set the timezone in page,is getdate aware of it? Because server knows whether timezone is +02 or 03 because of daylight saving.
Another solution would be to add offset * 60 * 60 to timestamp.