Four ways to count to four: PHP strings, iconv, mbstring and grapheme Nothing like starting the day with a nice café, in a Parisian café, pun intended. Now, when you ask PHP how long the word “Café” is, you get four answers from four families of functions. Two of them agree, one says 5, and […]
26
May
May
The Empty String in PHP: One Value, Too Many Jobs The humble empty string “” is everywhere. It’s the quiet default, the silent failure signal or the silent success signal, the lazy cast, the natural accumulator. Behind the obvious simplicity of the empty string in PHP lies a surprising amount of overloaded meanings, which leads […]
13
Feb
Feb
Refactoring Strings to Enums This article describes the journey of refactoring a not-so-old piece of code from using strings to using enumerations. Original Reasons When Exakat was started in 2014, enumerations were not even on the radar. Strings, and sometimes constants, were the obvious solution. As the original concept evolved quickly, strings were used everywhere, […]
19
Feb
Feb
All String Concatenations in PHP In PHP, string concatenation is a common operation used to combine multiple strings into a single one. There are no less than 4 ways to combine several strings into one. Each have it own usage, adapted to each context, and it is a good coding skill to know them all. […]
17
Feb
Feb
String to number comparison with PHP 8.x @FredBouchery reported one tiny update from PHP 8.0 : some of the comparisons have been modified between PHP 7 and PHP 8. This is pretty old news, since PHP 8.0 is not even the latest and greatest version of PHP, and it is also quite benign : For […]