What are the best practices for formatting dates when using strtotime in PHP?

When using strtotime in PHP, it is important to format dates in a way that strtotime can easily understand. The best practice is to use the standard date formats recognized by strtotime, such as "YYYY-MM-DD" or "MM/DD/YYYY". This ensures that strtotime can accurately convert the date string into a Unix timestamp.

$date = "2022-01-15";
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
echo date('Y-m-d', $timestamp);