In what scenarios would it be beneficial to use the strtotime function in PHP for date and time operations?

The strtotime function in PHP is beneficial for converting human-readable date and time expressions into Unix timestamps, which can then be used for various date and time operations. This can be particularly useful when working with user input or when needing to perform calculations or comparisons with dates and times.

// Example usage of strtotime function to convert a date string to a Unix timestamp
$dateString = '2022-01-01';
$timestamp = strtotime($dateString);
echo $timestamp; // Output: 1640995200