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Unit 8: Working with Strings, Date and Time



            The strings starts with <<<, followed by a string that you know doesn’t appear in your text.     Notes
            It  is  terminated  by  writing  that  string  at  the  beginning  of  a  line,  followed  by  an  optional
            semicolon (;), and then a required newline (\n).

            Escaping and variable substitution in here-docs is identical to double-quoted strings except that
            you are not required to escape double quotes.

            8.6 PHP String Handling Functions


            PHP is equally powerful than any other server side scripting languages in handling strings.
            We will experiment with some of the string functions of PHP with some examples. There are
            powerful functions like regular expressions to manage complex string handling requirements.
            Here are some of them.

                    Function            Action
                    chr                 Returns the character corresponding to an ASCII
                                        code.
                    crypt               One way encoding of a string (called hashing).
                    explode             Converts  a  character  delimited  string  into  an
                                        arraylike the VB Split function.
                    implode             Converts an array into a character delimited string.
                    ltrim               Remove characters (default is remove blanks) from
                                        the beginning of a string.
                    ord                 Return the ASCII code of a character.
                    parse_str           Extract the variables from a query string passed
                                        via a URL.
                    print               Display a string. Always return 1.
                    printf              Display a formatted string. Returns the length of
                                        the formatted string.
                    rtrim               Remove characters (default is remove blanks) from
                                        the endof a string.
                    sprintf             Return a formatted string.
                    str_replacestr_ireplace Replace  all  occurrences  of  a  substring  within  a
                                        string.&nsp;
                    str_split           Split  a  string  into  an  array  equal  length  chunks
                                        (defaultlength 1).
                    strcmp              Binary-safe string comparison.
                    strlen              Returns the length of a string.
                    strposstripos       Returns  the  position  of  first  occurrence  of  a
                                        substringin a string.
                    strrev              Returns a string with characters reversed.
                    strtolower          Returns a string with all characters converted to
                                        lowercase.


                                                                      Contd...




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