What are some best practices for comparing dates in PHP to ensure accurate sorting?

When comparing dates in PHP, it is important to ensure that the dates are in a format that can be easily compared. One way to do this is by converting the dates to a Unix timestamp using the strtotime function. This will allow for accurate sorting of dates regardless of their original format. 

$date1 = "2022-01-15";
$date2 = "2022-01-20";

$timestamp1 = strtotime($date1);
$timestamp2 = strtotime($date2);

if ($timestamp1 < $timestamp2) {
    echo "Date 1 is before Date 2";
} elseif ($timestamp1 > $timestamp2) {
    echo "Date 1 is after Date 2";
} else {
    echo "Date 1 is equal to Date 2";
}

Keywords

date comparison PHP sorting accuracy best practices

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