AN INTRODUCTION
PHP is a modern language, written by the open source community. Ever since it was written, users who are pushing it towards its limits have been encouraged to provide extra functions that stretch the limits further. This has resulted in a language with a huge array of functions, and it also means that what was an advanced, pioneering use of PHP a year or two ago has become a standard, run-of-the-mill use today. Modern computer power means that all these additional functions don't have any significant adverse effect on performance either, as they would have done with earlier generations of hardware.
The result of this is that if you say "I wish there was a function to do that", then there probably is. A lot of the effort involved in learning about PHP, once you get past the fundamental structures of the language, is in learning where to find the functions that you want.
String handling is one of the areas where there's a huge number of functions available; in order to help you learn about the various things you can do with string functions we have (somewhat artificially) divided them down into some more manageable groupings. In addition to these groupings:
- There are operators such as . and .= which operate on strings
- Strings can be handled as if they were arrays of characters
LOW LEVEL FUNCTIONS
Functions that you can use to find out how long a string is, where one string occurs for the first time in another, to replace part of one string (given a starting point and length) with another, etc. Also functions to compare strings to see which comes first / last in sorting.
Low level functions are (roughly) equivalent to the functions you have in a language such as C. You can do more or less anything with them, but you have a lot of code to write to do so. In PHP, the low level functions are important only where you have a specialist requirement that can't be met by the other types of functions.
HIGHER LEVEL FUNCTIONS
This group includes functions to encode and translate strings in various ways - ranging from forcing a whole string to upper or lower case and trimming off excess white space through to "webifying" - in other words, adding in HTML entities where there are special characters involved - and adding in / removing protection characters if you're going to save your data into a relational database.
We've also grouped functions that split a string into an array of parts (or tokenise the string in some way) into the higher level functions, and also functions such as strspn which lets you check that a string comprises only certain characters that are acceptable to you.
MATCHING, EXTRACTION AND REPLACEMENT FUNCTIONS
PHP supports a wide range of functions that lets you compare or match strings, ranging from checking whether two strings are the same through to much more powerful functions that let you look at a string and see if it looks like a pattern that you've defined. You can go further, extracting parts of your incoming string into an array based on which part of the pattern you've matched, or replacing pertinent parts of the incoming string with some other text.
Patterns that are used for matching in this way are known as "Regular Expressions
See also
String handling in PHP - training module
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