The timestamp to dates problem for PHP >= 5.1

Question

I may say I'm not a PHP programmer. I've been reading at http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php that:

The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer). However, before PHP 5.1.0 this range was limited from 01-01-1970 to 19-01-2038 on some systems (e.g. Windows).

I've database full of 1070-based-timestamps. How can I recover them with PHP >= 5.1?

Answer 1

My understanding is that your timestamps will work just fine. The way I read it, before PHP 5.1.0, negative timestamps were not allowed. A timestamp representing a date before 1970 requires a negative 32-bit integer.

In other words, timestamps pre- or post PHP 5.1.0 are all relative to Unix epoch, that is, 1970-01-01.