# Strings

# Introduction

These functions all manipulate strings in various ways. Some more specialized sections can be found in the regular expression and URL handling sections.

For information on how strings behave, especially with regard to usage of single quotes, double quotes, and escape sequences, see the Strings entry in the Types section of the manual.

- Installing/Configuring
  - Installation
- Predefined Constants
- String Functions
  - addcslashes — Quote string with slashes in a C style
  - addslashes — Quote string with slashes
  - bin2hex — Convert binary data into hexadecimal representation
  - chop — Alias of rtrim
  - chr — Generate a single-byte string from a number
  - chunk_split — Split a string into smaller chunks
  - convert_cyr_string — Convert from one Cyrillic character set to another
  - convert_uudecode — Decode a uuencoded string
  - convert_uuencode — Uuencode a string
  - count_chars — Return information about characters used in a string
  - crc32 — Calculates the crc32 polynomial of a string
  - crypt — One-way string hashing
  - echo — Output one or more strings
  - explode — Split a string by a string
  - fprintf — Write a formatted string to a stream
  - get_html_translation_table — Returns the translation table used by htmlspecialchars and htmlentities
  - hebrev — Convert logical Hebrew text to visual text
  - hebrevc — Convert logical Hebrew text to visual text with newline conversion
  - hex2bin — Decodes a hexadecimally encoded binary string
  - html_entity_decode — Convert HTML entities to their corresponding characters
  - htmlentities — Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
  - htmlspecialchars — Convert special characters to HTML entities
  - htmlspecialchars_decode — Convert special HTML entities back to characters
  - implode — Join array elements with a string
  - join — Alias of implode
  - lcfirst — Make a string's first character lowercase
  - levenshtein — Calculate Levenshtein distance between two strings
  - localeconv — Get numeric formatting information
  - ltrim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning of a string
  - md5 — Calculate the md5 hash of a string
  - md5_file — Calculates the md5 hash of a given file
  - metaphone — Calculate the metaphone key of a string
  - money_format — Formats a number as a currency string
  - nl_langinfo — Query language and locale information
  - nl2br — Inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string
  - number_format — Format a number with grouped thousands
  - ord — Convert the first byte of a string to a value between 0 and 255
  - parse_str — Parse a string as a URL query string
  - print — Output a string
  - printf — Output a formatted string
  - quoted_printable_decode — Convert a quoted-printable string to an 8 bit string
  - quoted_printable_encode — Convert a 8 bit string to a quoted-printable string
  - quotemeta — Quote meta characters
  - rtrim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the end of a string
  - setlocale — Set locale information
  - sha1 — Calculate the sha1 hash of a string
  - sha1_file — Calculate the sha1 hash of a file
  - similar_text — Calculate the similarity between two strings
  - soundex — Calculate the soundex key of a string
  - sprintf — Return a formatted string
  - sscanf — Parses input from a string according to a format
  - str_contains — Determine if a string contains a given substring
  - str_decrement — Decrement an alphanumeric string
  - str_ends_with — Checks if a string ends with a given substring
  - str_getcsv — Parse a CSV string into an array
  - str_increment — Increment an alphanumeric string
  - str_ireplace — Case-insensitive version of str_replace
  - str_pad — Pad a string to a certain length with another string
  - str_repeat — Repeat a string
  - str_replace — Replace all occurrences of the search string with the replacement string
  - str_rot13 — Perform the rot13 transform on a string
  - str_shuffle — Randomly shuffles a string
  - str_split — Convert a string to an array
  - str_starts_with — Checks if a string starts with a given substring
  - str_word_count — Return information about words used in a string
  - strcasecmp — Binary safe case-insensitive string comparison
  - strchr — Alias of strstr
  - strcmp — Binary safe string comparison
  - strcoll — Locale based string comparison
  - strcspn — Find length of initial segment not matching mask
  - strip_tags — Strip HTML and PHP tags from a string
  - stripcslashes — Un-quote string quoted with addcslashes
  - stripos — Find the position of the first occurrence of a case-insensitive substring in a string
  - stripslashes — Un-quotes a quoted string
  - stristr — Case-insensitive strstr
  - strlen — Get string length
  - strnatcasecmp — Case insensitive string comparisons using a "natural order" algorithm
  - strnatcmp — String comparisons using a "natural order" algorithm
  - strncasecmp — Binary safe case-insensitive string comparison of the first n characters
  - strncmp — Binary safe string comparison of the first n characters
  - strpbrk — Search a string for any of a set of characters
  - strpos — Find the position of the first occurrence of a substring in a string
  - strrchr — Find the last occurrence of a character in a string
  - strrev — Reverse a string
  - strripos — Find the position of the last occurrence of a case-insensitive substring in a string
  - strrpos — Find the position of the last occurrence of a substring in a string
  - strspn — Finds the length of the initial segment of a string consisting entirely of characters contained within a given mask
  - strstr — Find the first occurrence of a string
  - strtok — Tokenize string
  - strtolower — Make a string lowercase
  - strtoupper — Make a string uppercase
  - strtr — Translate characters or replace substrings
  - substr — Return part of a string
  - substr_compare — Binary safe comparison of two strings from an offset, up to length characters
  - substr_count — Count the number of substring occurrences
  - substr_replace — Replace text within a portion of a string
  - trim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning and end of a string
  - ucfirst — Make a string's first character uppercase
  - ucwords — Uppercase the first character of each word in a string
  - utf8_decode — Converts a string from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1, replacing invalid or unrepresentable characters
  - utf8_encode — Converts a string from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
  - vfprintf — Write a formatted string to a stream
  - vprintf — Output a formatted string
  - vsprintf — Return a formatted string
  - wordwrap — Wraps a string to a given number of characters
- Changelog

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