Are there any best practices for validating and processing date and time input from a form using PHP?

When validating and processing date and time input from a form using PHP, it is important to ensure that the input follows a specific format and is a valid date or time. One way to achieve this is by using PHP's built-in functions like strtotime() and date_create() to parse and validate the input.

// Validate and process date and time input from a form
$input_date = $_POST['date'];
$input_time = $_POST['time'];

// Validate date
$date = date_create($input_date);
if (!$date) {
    echo "Invalid date format";
}

// Validate time
$time = strtotime($input_time);
if ($time === false) {
    echo "Invalid time format";
}

// Process date and time
$formatted_date = date_format($date, 'Y-m-d');
$formatted_time = date('H:i:s', $time);

// Use $formatted_date and $formatted_time in further processing