What are the best practices for standardizing date and time formats in PHP arrays to ensure accurate sorting?

When working with date and time data in PHP arrays, it is important to standardize the formats to ensure accurate sorting. One way to achieve this is by using the strtotime() function to convert date and time strings into Unix timestamps, which can then be easily compared and sorted. By consistently formatting all date and time values in the array using strtotime(), you can ensure that they are in a standardized format for sorting.

// Sample array with date and time values
$dateTimes = [
    "2022-01-15 08:30:00",
    "2022-01-10 12:45:00",
    "2022-01-20 09:00:00"
];

// Convert date and time strings to Unix timestamps
foreach ($dateTimes as $key => $dateTime) {
    $dateTimes[$key] = strtotime($dateTime);
}

// Sort the array in ascending order
asort($dateTimes);

// Output the sorted array
foreach ($dateTimes as $key => $dateTime) {
    echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $dateTime) . PHP_EOL;
}