How can PHP beginners effectively handle and manipulate time duration data, such as lap times, in a database?

When handling time duration data like lap times in a database, PHP beginners can effectively store the values as integers representing the duration in seconds. This makes it easier to perform calculations and comparisons. To manipulate the data, beginners can use PHP functions like strtotime() to convert time strings to seconds and date() to format the duration back into a readable time format.

// Storing lap time in seconds
$lapTime = strtotime('00:01:30'); // 1 minute and 30 seconds
$lapTimeInSeconds = date('s', $lapTime) + date('i', $lapTime) * 60 + date('H', $lapTime) * 3600;

// Manipulating lap time data
$additionalSeconds = 15;
$newLapTimeInSeconds = $lapTimeInSeconds + $additionalSeconds;

// Formatting lap time back into readable format
$newLapTime = gmdate('H:i:s', $newLapTimeInSeconds);
echo $newLapTime; // Output: 00:01:45