What is the purpose of converting an array value to a formatted date in PHP?

When working with dates in PHP, it is often necessary to convert an array value representing a date into a formatted date string. This can be useful for displaying dates in a more human-readable format or for performing date calculations and comparisons. By using PHP's date() function along with mktime() or strtotime() to convert the array value into a timestamp, we can easily format the date according to our desired format.

// Sample array value representing a date
$dateArray = ['year' => 2022, 'month' => 10, 'day' => 15];

// Convert array value to timestamp
$timestamp = mktime(0, 0, 0, $dateArray['month'], $dateArray['day'], $dateArray['year']);

// Format the timestamp into a desired date format
$formattedDate = date('Y-m-d', $timestamp);

echo $formattedDate; // Output: 2022-10-15