Programming PHP, 3rd Edition

Accessing Individual Characters

The strlen() function returns the number of characters in a string:

$string = 'Hello, world';
$length = strlen($string); // $length is 12

You can use the string offset syntax on a string to address individual characters:

$string = 'Hello';
for ($i=0; $i < strlen($string); $i++) {
  printf("The %dth character is %s\n", $i, $string{$i});
}
The 0th character is H
The 1th character is e
The 2th character is l
The 3th character is l
The 4th character is o