date conflict with old news archive

God i hope this is simple :) I have news bloggs section on my site. At present the news is loaded in from a txt file, most of the site is now running with most sections being loaded via mysqldb's. I would like to add the old entries to the new db that i have setup for the bloggs. My problem is converting the date format from 12-08-03 to the time stamp to be stored int the db. It has to be done this way as new entries will be using the time stamp So in the php file i have $dateAdded = time(); but time would then be 1064245532 i need date=12-08-03 $dateAdded = date(convert) to time stamp cheers Paul