Back to Blog 2 min read

PHP String Functions: A Complete Guide

Are you working with strings in PHP and looking for ways to manipulate them? PHP provides a variety of built-in functions that can help you do just t...

Are you working with strings in PHP and looking for ways to manipulate them? PHP provides a variety of built-in functions that can help you do just that. In this post, we'll go over some of the most common string functions in PHP and how they can be used.

  1. strlen: This function returns the length of a string. For example:
$str = "Hello world";
echo strlen($str); // Outputs "11"
  1. strtolower: This function converts a string to lowercase. For example:
$str = "HELLO WORLD";
echo strtolower($str); // Outputs "hello world"
  1. strtoupper: This function converts a string to uppercase. For example:
$str = "hello world";
echo strtoupper($str); // Outputs "HELLO WORLD"
  1. substr: This function returns a portion of a string. It takes two arguments: the string and the start and end indices (inclusive). For example:
$str = "Hello world";
echo substr($str, 0, 5); // Outputs "Hello"

str_replace: This function replaces all occurrences of a search string with a replacement string. It takes three arguments: the search string, the replacement string, and the original string. For example:

$str = "Hello world";
echo str_replace("world", "PHP", $str); // Outputs "Hello PHP"
  1. strpos: This function returns the position of the first occurrence of a search string. It takes two arguments: the search string and the original string. For example:
$str = "Hello world";
echo strpos($str, "world"); // Outputs "6"
  1. strtr: This function translates certain characters in a string. It takes two arguments: the original string and an array of translations. For example:
$str = "Hello world";
echo strtr($str, array("world" => "PHP")); // Outputs "Hello PHP"
  1. htmlspecialchars: This function converts special characters to HTML entities. This is useful for displaying text on a web page, as the special characters will be displayed as-is instead of being interpreted as HTML. For example:
$str = "<p>This is a paragraph</p>";
echo htmlspecialchars($str); // Outputs "<p>This is a paragraph</p>"
  1. nl2br: This function inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string. This is useful for displaying text with line breaks on a web page. For example:
$str = "This is a paragraph\nThis is another paragraph";
echo nl2br($str); // Outputs "This is a paragraph<br>This is another paragraph"
  1. trim: This function removes whitespace from the beginning and end of a string. For example:

$str = " Hello world ";
echo trim($str);

These are the some basic string functions in PHP, I hope it will help. Thanks Larachamp