What are some best practices for handling date calculations in PHP to ensure accuracy and efficiency?

When handling date calculations in PHP, it is important to use the built-in DateTime class for accurate and efficient operations. This class provides a wide range of methods for manipulating dates and times, as well as handling time zones and daylight saving time changes.

// Example of calculating the difference between two dates using DateTime
$date1 = new DateTime('2022-01-01');
$date2 = new DateTime('2022-02-01');
$interval = $date1->diff($date2);
echo $interval->format('%R%a days');