[forgottenpass]

You typically parse a timestamp like "1999-03-29 20:02:04 CEST" and return a number of seconds since a given point in time (e.g. UNIX epoch if it must be).

There's your conversion. I'm not saying it's not easy, I'm saying you're just pulling you out of a hole that your tools were configured to dig.

[supine]

An example of some of the pitfalls involved: http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/DateTime-1.10/lib/DateTime.p...