by In this tutorial, we would cover string manipulation in PHP.
Just like in other languages, string in PHP are a sequence of characters. Some examples of strings are given below:
$string1 = "You can learn PHP"; $string0 = ""; //this is an empty string $string2 = 'This is a singly quoted string';
About singly and double-quoted strings
Singly quoted strings are just output literally. However, double quoted strings would replace any containing variables with the actual values of those variables. An example is given below
<?php $name = "Kindson"; echo "My name is $name <br>"; echo 'My name is $name'; ?>
The result of the above code is shown below
My name is Kindson My name is $name
Escape Sequences
This are special combination of characters used certain operations such as:
- \n represents the newline character
- \r represents the carriage-return character
- \t represents the tab character
- \$ represents the dollar sign itself ($)
- \” represents a single double-quote (“)
- \\ represents a single backslash (\)
String Concatenation Operator
The dot (.) operator is used to concatenate two variables.
The strlen() function
This function is used to find the length of a string. For example
<?php echo strlen("Learning PHP is fun"); ?>
The strpos() function
This function is used to search for a string or character within a string. If it finds a match, then the position of the first match is found, else, it will return false.
Some useful String functions
I have made a list of some other string functions you should know. See the table below:
| SN | Name and Description |
| 1 | trim() – removes whitespaced from the left and right of a string |
| 2 | ltrim() – removes whitespaces from the beginning of a string |
| 3 | rtrim() – removes whitespaces from the end of a string |
| 4 | substr(str, start, stop) – finds a substring from |
| 5 | strncmp() – compares two strings |
| 6 | explode(int sep, string str) – splits a string into an array of strings based on a separator |
| 7 | strrev() – reverses a string |
| 8 | strstr() – finds the first occurrence of a string within a string |
| 9 | preg_match(pattern, str) – finds the first occurrence string pattern in string str. |
Complete list of string functions can be found here
