What are the best practices for sorting date and time data in PHP arrays before outputting them?

When sorting date and time data in PHP arrays, it is important to convert the date and time strings into a format that can be properly sorted, such as Unix timestamps. This allows for accurate sorting based on the actual date and time values rather than just string comparison. Once the data is converted, you can use PHP's array sorting functions like usort() to sort the array based on the date and time values.

// Sample array of date and time strings
$dates = ['2022-01-15 10:30:00', '2022-01-10 08:00:00', '2022-01-20 15:45:00'];

// Convert date and time strings to Unix timestamps
$timestamps = array_map(function($date) {
    return strtotime($date);
}, $dates);

// Sort the array based on the Unix timestamps
array_multisort($timestamps, $dates);

// Output the sorted date and time values
foreach ($dates as $date) {
    echo $date . PHP_EOL;
}