What are some best practices for handling date strings within PHP, especially when they are part of a larger string?

When handling date strings within PHP, especially when they are part of a larger string, it's best to use PHP's date parsing functions to ensure accurate parsing and manipulation of the date. One common approach is to use the strtotime() function to convert the date string into a Unix timestamp, which can then be formatted using the date() function. Additionally, using regular expressions can help extract date strings from larger strings if needed. 

// Example of parsing and formatting date strings within a larger string
$fullString = "Event on 2022-12-31 at 8:00 PM";
preg_match('/\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}/', $fullString, $matches);
$dateString = $matches[0];

$dateTimestamp = strtotime($dateString);
$formattedDate = date('Y-m-d', $dateTimestamp);

echo $formattedDate; // Output: 2022-12-31

Keywords

date formatting strtotime DateTime class regular expressions date manipulation

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