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PHP PHP Basics (Retired) PHP Datatypes Strings

Gareth Redfern
Gareth Redfern
36,217 Points
Posted by Gareth Redfern
Gareth Redfern
36,217 Points

Why in PHP do you use the { } syntax to access or change a single letter?

Why in PHP do you use the { } syntax to access or change a single letter? Is it because the string is classed as an object and that would be how you access the keys of an object? Hampton Paulk

1 Answer

Ricardo Hill-Henry
Ricardo Hill-Henry
38,442 Points

I do believe the brackets {} come from legacy Perl hashes. I actually thought the brackets we're not as popular to use in practice now; even the PHP documentation doesn't list use it. Instead the syntax used "should" be str[n]. This syntax better points to the fact that a string is nothing but an array of characters, and it's a modern practice. Essentially you could use str[n] str{n} or substr() interchangeably though.

Gareth Redfern
Gareth Redfern
36,217 Points
Gareth Redfern
Gareth Redfern
36,217 Points

Thank you for your answer, that helps explain things. Coming from JS I would have thought the array syntax would be used, but I wasn't sure.

Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points
Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points

That's really weird, I've never seen the curly braces use like that before.