How can variables be properly incorporated into strtotime() functions in PHP?

When incorporating variables into strtotime() functions in PHP, it is important to concatenate the variable properly within the function call. This can be achieved by using the dot (.) operator to concatenate the variable with the desired date string.

// Example of incorporating variables into strtotime() function
$days = 7;
$next_week = strtotime('+' . $days . ' days');
echo date('Y-m-d', $next_week);