Newbie timestamp question

Good Morning!!

    I'm repairing a series of scripts in PHP that use the 'datetime' of MySQL
and converting them to Postgres. Question is this: The datetime format used
in the script is 'YYYYMMDDHHMMSS' as a text string. Do I have to convert
this to the format shown in the Postgres manual: '1999-01-08 04:05:06' for
Postgres to accept the value or can I just pass an integer as 19990108040506
for the timestamp?

    Thanks in advance.

    Robin Kopetzky
    Black Mesa Computers/Internet Services
    Grants, NM