Reverse string without strrev

Question

Some time ago during a job interview I got the task to reverse a string in PHP without using strrev.

My first solution was something like this:

Answer 1

You could use the XOR swap trick.

function rev($str) {
    $len = strlen($str);

    for($i = 0; $i < floor($len / 2); ++$i) {
        $str[$i] = $str[$i] ^ $str[$len - $i - 1];
        $str[$len - $i - 1] = $str[$i] ^ $str[$len - $i - 1];
        $str[$i] = $str[$i] ^ $str[$len - $i - 1];
    }

    return $str;
}

print rev("example");