Fortunately PHP provides a number of tools such as strtotime() for this purpose. All you have to do is pass the date to the strtotime() function. The strtotime function converts the given date to a Unix timestamp which we can then use with the date function and the l (lowercase L) placeholder to obtain the day of the week. The following code demonstrate how it works:
?php
$timestamp = strtotime("Apr 25th 1990");
$day = date("l", $timestamp);
echo $day; // Wednesday