


Strings are sets of ordered characters that make up text.
Strings are normally contained within " "
or ' '
.
The difference between the single quotation mark (or apostrophe) and the double quotation marks (speech marks) is that variables within the single quotation marks (') will not be parsed as variables and will be output directly as they are. In double quotation marks (") the variable will be parsed:
<?php $x = 10; echo "$x is $x"; echo "<br />; echo '$x is $x'; ?>
Strings can be manipulated in many different ways
such as with other programming languages such as Java. For instance, the
substring
method will get a smaller
inner string from within a string. In PHP, there are several generic
string methods.
When a string has text that is to be replaced,
str_replace
replaces a string
within a string and returns it. The following example will replace
the word "website" with "dynamic website" within the string specified
to it and stores it in
$test
.
<?php $myStr = "Welcome to my website"; $test = str_replace("website", "dynamic website", $myStr); ?>
To get the length of some string the
strlen
function can be used. This
takes in a string as a parameter and returns the length of the string.
<?php $myStr = "Welcome to my website"; $test = strlen($myStr); ?>
To get the index of the first occurence of a string within
a string, the
strpos
method
is used. It is given a parameter of the string to search then
the string to search for.
<?php $myStr = "Welcome to my website"; $test = strpos($myStr, "website"); ?>
In this case, this will return the first index where the word "website" appears.
A substring is a string within a string. That is means in
logic, we can state that A ⊂ B.
In PHP we can use the
substr
method.
To get a substring from the string "My name
is Jamie" the
substr
method can be used to get just my "Jamie". If
"Jamie" begins on character 12, then the first letter is
on character 11, taking into account Base 0 counting.
<?php $myStr = "My name is Jamie"; $test = substr($myStr, 11, 5); ?>
substr
takes in three parameters, one which contains the
string to substring, one that specifies where to begin the substring
from and an optional length. So the last parameter was set to
3 it would return "Jam" rather than "Jamie". The last parameter
is optional, so if it is not included it takes from the
start to the end.
MD5 and SHA1 are both string hash algorithms that allow the encoding of a string for use in URLs, order numbers or to store a unique reference in a database or on a web server. Both of these work differently under the hood. Both are shown below.
It is beyond the scope of this article to describe the benefits of MD5 or SHA1, but for the sake of web programming in PHP, it is necessary to know how to store information correctly.
<?php $myStr = "My name is Jamie"; $test = md5($myStr); ?>
<?php $myStr = "My name is Jamie"; $test = sha1($myStr); ?>
Strings are merged together in PHP using the
concatenation operator. In Java, this operator is +
. In
VB.NET this operator is +
or &
. In PHP the .
(full stop) is
the concatenation operator.
Two strings can be joined using the following:
<?php $test = "My hello world " . " is different to yours."; ?>
Strings are a set of ordered characters. As this is the case it is sometimes necessary to obtain a certain character from such a string. Getting an index from a string is done using the square brackets like this:
<?php $myStr = "My name is Jamie"; $test = $myStr[4]; ?>
Where the 4 inside the square brackets is the index.
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