What is the best practice for retrieving the earliest value from a DateTime array in PHP?

When retrieving the earliest value from a DateTime array in PHP, the best practice is to use the `min()` function along with a custom comparison function. This allows you to compare the DateTime objects in the array and find the earliest one.

// Sample DateTime array
$dateTimes = [
    new DateTime('2022-01-01'),
    new DateTime('2022-03-15'),
    new DateTime('2022-02-10')
];

// Custom comparison function to compare DateTime objects
function compareDates($a, $b) {
    if ($a == $b) {
        return 0;
    }
    return ($a < $b) ? -1 : 1;
}

// Retrieve the earliest DateTime value from the array
$earliestDate = min($dateTimes, 'compareDates');

echo $earliestDate->format('Y-m-d'); // Output: 2022-01-01