What potential pitfalls should be avoided when using strtotime() function in PHP?

One potential pitfall when using the strtotime() function in PHP is that it can return false if the input date string is not in a valid format. To avoid this issue, always ensure that the date string passed to strtotime() is in a format that it can parse correctly. One way to do this is by using the date_create_from_format() function to create a DateTime object with a specific format before passing it to strtotime().

$dateString = "2022-01-01";
$dateObject = date_create_from_format('Y-m-d', $dateString);

if($dateObject){
    $timestamp = strtotime($dateObject->format('Y-m-d'));
    echo $timestamp;
} else {
    echo "Invalid date format";
}