In what situations would it be beneficial to use the strtotime() function in PHP for date conversions?

The strtotime() function in PHP is beneficial for converting human-readable dates into Unix timestamps, which can then be easily manipulated and compared in PHP. This function is particularly useful when working with date calculations, such as finding the difference between two dates or adding/subtracting time from a given date.

// Example usage of strtotime() function to convert a human-readable date to a Unix timestamp
$date = "2022-01-01";
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
echo $timestamp;