{ } appearing around dates?!

ive written an export/import script for getting my posts out of boastmachine and in to wordpress. It’s working fine, except for the date conversion.

In boast machine the dates are in php time() format. I have used the code:

gmdate(“Y-m-d H:i:s”, $date)

then inserted that to the wordpress tables. They’re working ok, except all the dates are coming out with a { in front. eg:

{1}June 17, 2006

The default date settings of wordpress are:

Default date format: F j, Y
Output: {1}June 17, 2006

any ideas what might be happening? I dont have any plugins installed, and am using the default template.

Thanks,
Matt.