Step 1 - PHP string basic

PHP string tutorial

1. The first and most known way is to specify a string in single quotes. Similar to other programing languages you need to use backslash '\' if you want to display a single quote in your text.
   

   Code: 
   <?php
      $str_1 = 'Demo text';
      $str_2 = 'Demo text with single quote(\')';
      echo $str_1;
      echo $str_2;
   ?>
   PHP F1

2.  The second option to use double quotes. Between double quotes you can use more escape character in your string. Besides this if you put a variable in the string then PHP will interpret it and display the content of the variable.
   

   Code: 
   <?php
      $str_1 = "Demo text";
      $str_2 = "Demo text with double quote(\")\r\n";
      $demo = "Internal";
      $str_3 = "This is a $demo string";
      echo $str_1;
      echo $str_2;
      echo $str_3;
   ?>
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   Here the most important part is the string defined as $str_3 and its output in line 8 will result this:
   
   

   Output: 
   This is a Internal string

   
   
   
3. And last you can use heredoc as well. In this case you define your text between heredoc identifiers. In this case it is DEMO. You need to start it with the operator <<< and then the identifier. If you are ready you need to close the heredoc part by adding the identifier again at the beginning of a new line like this:
   

   Code: 
   <?php
      $str_1 = <<<DEMO
      This is a heredoc message
    
      Text.
   DEMO;
    
      echo $str_1;
   ?>
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   As you can see the output is in the same formatting - text indent, new lines - as it was defined. You can use variables in case of heredoc as well as in case of double quoted strings.

The 2. case is the most interesting string definition version so let's see a bit more how to insert a variable inside a string. (You can use variables in case 3. as well but heredoc is not so common.)

Step 2 - Variable parsing in string

PHP string tutorial

Time to time you need to compose a complete text from sub strings and variables. For example if you want to greet your visitor you want to display a text like:

"Hello Peter, nice to see you again!"

Of course you can not hard code the user name but you want to use a variable like $userName. If you use single quoted strings then you can display your text like this:

Code: 
<?php
   $userName = "Peter";
 
   echo 'Hello '.$userName.', nice to see you again!';
?>
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Using double quotes you can make it more simple:

Code: 
<?php
   $userName = "Peter";
 
   echo "Hello $userName, nice to see you again!";
?>
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The more variable you need to use the bigger is the difference.

After the basic case let's see some more complex variable parsing. What if you want to display the text:

"Peters website"

Using the above examples the $userName variable contains only the string Peter and if you compose your string as before:

Code: 
<?php
   $userName = "Peter";
 
   echo "$userNames website";
?>
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You will get a warning and the result is not what you expected:

Output: 
Notice: Undefined variable: userNames in Z:\wdocs\test.php on line 4 website

To solve this problem you need to enclose the variable in curly braces like in the following example: 

Code: 
<?php
   $userName = "Peter";
 
   echo "${userName}s website";
   echo "{$userName}s website";
?>
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As you can see it is possible to enclose only the variable name without the $ sign or the complete variable.

You have to use this solution in case of arrays as well in the following way:

Code: 
<?php
   $users = array('U1' => "Peter");
 
   echo "Hello {$users['U1']}, nice to see you again!";
?>
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You can read about string concatenation in the next section.

Step 3 - String concatenation, manipulation

PHP string tutorial

As you could see on the previous page we used string concatenation in our example codes. Now let's see how we can compose a string in details.

You can concatenate string in PHP using the dot (.) operator. You can do this more ways as you can see in the following example code:

Code: 
<?php
   // Use only one type of quoting
   $str_1 = "This "."is"." a "."test message";
 
   // Use mixed quoting
   $str_2 = 'This '."is a".' test message';
 
   // Or devide it into more lines
   $str_3  = "This";
   $str_3 .= " is a";
   $str_3 .= " test message";
 
   $str_4 = "This"
          . " is a"
          . " test message";
?>
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String modification

Here I only mention the string modification by characters. As you know strings a a series of characters. It means you can use it as a string. So if you have a string variable $name with a value "Peter" then you can access the firs letter (P) as $name[0].

Code: 
<?php
   $name = 'Peter';
 
   for ($i = 0; $i< 5; $i++){
      echo "{$name[$i]}<br/>";
   }
?>
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And if you can access it you can of course modify the elements one by one like this:

Code: 
<?php
   $name = 'Peter';
 
   $name[0] = 'M';
   $name[4] = 'o';
   $name[5] = 'r';
 
   echo $name
?>
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For more special string manipulation function visit our other specialized tutorials (coming soon)

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