What are some best practices for handling leap years in PHP when performing date calculations or comparisons?

When handling leap years in PHP for date calculations or comparisons, it is important to consider that leap years have 366 days instead of the usual 365. One common approach is to use PHP's built-in functions like `date` or `DateTime` which automatically account for leap years. Another approach is to check if a year is a leap year using the `date('L')` function, which returns 1 for leap years and 0 for non-leap years. 

// Check if a year is a leap year
$year = 2024; // Example year
$isLeapYear = date('L', strtotime("$year-01-01")) == 1;

// Using DateTime to handle leap years in date calculations
$date = new DateTime("$year-02-29");
echo $date->format('Y-m-d'); // Output: 2024-02-29

Keywords

leap years date calculations date comparisons PHP functions error handling

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