In the last lesson, PHP Echo, we used strings a bit, but didn’t talk about them in depth. Throughout your PHP career you will be using strings a great deal, so it is important to have a basic understanding of PHP strings.

A string is a sequence of characters

PHP string creation

Before you can use a string you have to create it! A string can be used directly in a function or it can be stored in a variable. Below we create the exact same string twice: first storing it into a variable and in the second case we send the string directly to echo.

Example:

<?php
$dcsText = "techTutorialsOnline.com!";//variable that contains a string
echo "Best tutorials website for students and developers : <b>".$dcsText."";
?>

Common string function:

 

• PHP strlen() Function

  This function is used to find the length of a given string. This function is very common in use as many of the times we need to know the length of the string.

  Syntax:

  Strlen(string whose length you want to find);

  Example:

  <?php
  $dcsText = "techTutorialsOnline.com!";//variable that contains a string
  echo "Length of given string is : ".strlen($dcsText);
  ?>

   

•  PHP stripos() Function

  This function is used to “Find the position of the first occurrence of some substring inside the string:”

  Syntax

  stripos(string,find,start)

  Example:

  <?php
  $dcsText = "This string contains dcs word three time. Firstone is already written, second and third is here: dcs, dcs";//variable that contains a string
  echo "postion of given word is : ".stripos($dcsText,"dcs");
  ?>

   

• PHP strcmp() Function

  This function is used to compare two strings.

  Note: The comparison is case sensitive i.e the string “techTutorialsOnline” and “techTutorialsOnline” is different.

  Syntax:

  Strcmp(first string,second string);

  Example:

<?php
$dcs_first = "aa";
$dcs_second = "aa";
if(!strcmp($dcs_first, $dcs_second))
{
echo "Both strings are having same content";
}
else
{
echo "Strings are not equal";
}
?>

Note: In the above example, we have used the ! operator which we will learn in detail in the upcoming tuts. If the output of strcmp() function is 0 then that means strings are equal. That’s why we have used ! (NOT) operator.

This is how you can use PHP Strings. Good Luck!