What are some best practices for formatting and displaying dates retrieved from a MySQL database in a PHP application?

When retrieving dates from a MySQL database in a PHP application, it is important to format and display them in a user-friendly way. One common best practice is to use the PHP date() function along with the strtotime() function to convert the retrieved date into a desired format. This ensures that the date is displayed consistently and clearly to users.

// Retrieve date from MySQL database
$raw_date = $row['date'];

// Format and display date in desired format
$formatted_date = date('F j, Y', strtotime($raw_date));

echo $formatted_date;