How can the use of explode function compare to strtotime and date functions for extracting date components in PHP?

When extracting date components in PHP, the explode function can be used to split a date string into an array of its components, such as day, month, and year. This can be useful when the date format is consistent and predictable. On the other hand, the strtotime function can be used to convert a date string into a Unix timestamp, which can then be used with the date function to extract specific date components in a more flexible way.

// Using explode function to extract date components
$dateString = "2022-01-15";
$dateComponents = explode("-", $dateString);
$year = $dateComponents[0];
$month = $dateComponents[1];
$day = $dateComponents[2];

// Using strtotime and date functions to extract date components
$dateString = "2022-01-15";
$timestamp = strtotime($dateString);
$year = date("Y", $timestamp);
$month = date("m", $timestamp);
$day = date("d", $timestamp);