Hello world program – stoimen's web log on web development Tue, 13 Feb 2018 08:18:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.3 Powerful PHP: Less Known String Manipulation /2011/08/18/powerful-php-less-known-string-manipulation/ /2011/08/18/powerful-php-less-known-string-manipulation/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:01:51 +0000 /?p=2343 Continue reading Powerful PHP: Less Known String Manipulation →
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]]> Yet another thing that’s great in PHP is the power you have when doing some string manipulation/operation. Here’s something that is really useful, but I think it remains a bit unknown. Let’s imagine you need to take the first (or whatever) character of a string. Most developers go to the obvious:

$str = 'hello world';
echo substr($str, 0, 1); // outputs "h"

But here’s something better and cleaner.

echo $str{0}; // outputs "h"

This code chunk return the first character of $str, but it can be used with the same success for any other character of the string. In my opinion this is more cleaner and its really syntactically self documented.

This approach can be useful when trying to check whether the first symbol for instance is “?” or “/”.

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  1. PHP: What is More Powerful Than list()
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