Converting string to Date and DateTime

Question

If I have a PHP string in the format of mm-dd-YYYY (for example, 10-16-2003), how do I properly convert that to a Date and then a DateTime

Answer 1

$d = new DateTime('10-16-2003');

$timestamp = $d->getTimestamp(); // Unix timestamp
$formatted_date = $d->format('Y-m-d'); // 2003-10-16

Edit: you can also pass a DateTimeZone to DateTime() constructor to ensure the creation of the date for the desired time zone, not the server default one.