PHP equivalent of Date.UTC function in javascript?
===

I'm fetching dates from MySQL as strings (`Y-m-d` format). I need to display a chart using [Highcharts][1]. Highcharts uses javascript [`Date.UTC`][2] function:

> Return the number of milliseconds between a specified date and
> midnight January 1 1970.

    data: [
        [Date.UTC(1970,  9, 27), 0   ],
        [Date.UTC(1970, 10, 10), 0.6 ],
        [Date.UTC(1970, 10, 18), 0.7 ],
        [Date.UTC(1970, 11,  2), 0.8 ],
        [Date.UTC(1970, 11,  9), 0.6 ],

But i'd like to avoid javascript and do in in PHP (assigning a JSON object - the chart - to the page itself). What's the equivalent of `Date.UTC` function in PHP (regardless the server datezone)?

    $date      = '2012-07-07';
    $millisecs = 1000 * unix_timestap_utc_regardless_server_zone($date);


  [1]: http://www.highcharts.com/
  [2]: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_utc.asp