PHP checkdate variants

I found a php function checkdate() , but strangely enough it only seems to accept data in format of int $month , int $day , int $year. However I am passing the date as a string (example "2012-06-13") so I came up with this workaround, because I would only allow date entered in such format. Unfortunately I am feeling this is both insecure and not a nice approach to the problem:

function CheckAdditional($value)
{
    $data = explode("-", $value);

    return checkdate($data[1], $data[2], $data[0]);
}

Question: is there a better way to check whether the date is valid?

Answer

<?php

function CheckAdditional($value)
{
    return date('Y-m-d', strtotime($value)) == $value;
}

?>

After several tests from both me and the people who tried to help me with my answer, I came up with this which suits me perfectly fine and is both easy and really reliable solution in my opinion as none was able to prove it wrong so far.