String to Array and Back

Question

I have a string, how do I convert it to an array?

After manipulating that array, how do I again make it into a string?

Do strings in PHP behave the same way

Answer 1

For all those looking for a simple multi-byte solution ...

Remember, set the character encoding appropriately for your task.

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');  // For example.
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');     // For example.

String to Array

$characters = mb_split("", $string); // Returns an array.

Array to String

$newString = implode($charaters);

Your other option would be to loop through $characters and concatenate the string yourself!

Answer 2

In PHP Strings can be accessed like arrays.

e.g.:

$my_string = 'abcdef';

$my_string[0] ==> 'a'
$my_string[1] ==> 'b'

If you want to convert a series of words into an array then use explode(' ',$my_string);

Note: Strings in PHP are not the same as Java. In PHP they can also represent the contents of any file.

You can learn almost anything there is to know by checking the documentation :)

Answer 3

In PHP you can split and join. Don´t know how Java behaves.

Answer 4

In Java you can do String.tocharArray() which converts the string into an array of characters. You can do a String.split(regex) to split by a regular expression, returning a String array. A char array or String array can be looped on easily to convert back to a string.

I'm not sure what you mean by "do they behave the same". Essentially they provide the same functionality... however in Java a String is an object that can be iterated upon if need be.

Answer 5

à la perl

<?php
    $string = 'aslkdjlcnasklhdalkfhlasierjnalskdj';
    $array  = array_slice(preg_split('//sx', $string), 1, -1);
?>

Answer 6

as in C, strings are arrays in php

then

<?php
$a = "hola";

for($i=0; $i < strlen($a); $i++) {
 echo $a[$i] . "\n";

}

$a[2] = "-"; // will print ho-a
?>

what operation do you want to do?