What are the advantages and disadvantages of using substrings versus date functions for manipulating date strings in PHP?

When manipulating date strings in PHP, using date functions like strtotime() and date() is generally more reliable and easier to work with compared to using substrings. Date functions provide built-in functionality for parsing and formatting dates, making it easier to handle different date formats and timezones. On the other hand, using substrings can be error-prone and less flexible, as it requires manual manipulation of the date string which can lead to bugs and inconsistencies. 

// Using date functions to manipulate date strings
$dateString = "2022-10-15";
$timestamp = strtotime($dateString);
$newDate = date("Y-m-d", $timestamp);

echo $newDate;

Keywords

substrings date functions manipulating PHP advantages disadvantages

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