PHP - iterate on string characters

Question

Is there a nice way to iterate on the characters of a string   I d like to be able to do foreach  array map  array walk  array filter etc  on the characters of a string   Type casting juggling didnt get me anywhere  put the whole string as one element of array   and the best solution I ve found is simply using a for loop to construct the array   It feels like there should be something better   I mean  if you can index on it shouldn t you be able to iterate as well   This is the best I ve got  function stringToArray  s         r   array        for  i 0   i lt strlen  s    i               r  i     s  i       return  r      s1    textasstringwoohoo    arr   stringToArray  s1      arr now has character array   ascval   array map  ord    arr      so i can do stuff like this  foreach   arr as  curChar          evenAsciiOnly   array filter  function  x   return ord  x    2     0     arr     Is there either   A  A way to make the string iterable B  A better way to build the character array from the string   and if so  how about the other direction    I feel like im missing something obvious here

User · Answer

Expanded from  SeaBrightSystems answer  you could try this    s1    textasstringwoohoo    arr   str split  s1      arr now has character array

User · Answer

For those who are looking for the fastest way to iterate over strings in php  Ive prepared a benchmark testing  The first method in which you access string characters directly by specifying its position in brackets and treating string like an array    string    a sample string for testing    char    string 4     equals to m   I myself thought the latter is the fastest method  but I was wrong  As with the second method  which is used in the accepted answer     string    a sample string for testing    string   str split  string    char    string 4     equals to m   This method is going to be faster cause we are using a real array and not assuming one to be an array     Calling the last line of each of the above methods for 1000000 times lead to these benchmarking results     Using string i  0 24960017204285 Seconds    Using str split 0 18720006942749 Seconds  Which means the second method is way faster

User · Answer

Unicode Codepoint Escape Syntax in PHP 7 0  str    cat  u 1F431        IIFE  Immediately Invoked Function Expression  in PHP 7 0  gen    function string  str        for   i   0   len   mb strlen  str    i  lt   len     i            yield mb substr  str   i  1             str    var dump      true      gen instanceof Traversable         PHP 7 1     true     is iterable  gen      foreach   gen as  char        echo  char  PHP EOL

User · Answer

You can also just access  s1 like an array  if you only need to access it    s1    hello world   echo  s1 0      - gt  h

User · Answer

If your strings are in Unicode you should use preg split with  u modifier   From comments in php documentation   function mb str split   string            Split at all position not after the start           and not before the end         return preg split      lt          u    string

User · Answer

Iterate string   for   i   0   i  lt  strlen  str    i         echo  str  i

User · Answer

Most of the answers forgot about non English characters      strlen counts BYTES  not characters  that is why it is and it s sibling functions works fine with English characters  because English characters are stored in 1 byte in both UTF-8 and ASCII encodings  you need to use the multibyte string functions mb    This will work with any character encoded in UTF-8     8 characters in 12 bytes  string    abcd         charsCount   mb strlen  string   UTF-8    for  i   0   i  lt   charsCount   i          char   mb substr  string   i  1   UTF-8        var dump  char       This outputs  string 1   a  string 1   b  string 1   c  string 1   d  string 2      string 2      string 2      string 2

User · Answer

Step 1  convert the string to an array using the str split function   array   str split  your string    Step 2  loop through the newly created array  foreach   array as  char     echo  char      You can check the PHP docs for more information  str split

User · Answer

Hmm    There s no need to complicate things  The basics work great always         string    abcdef        len   strlen   string         x   0    Forward Direction      while    len  gt   x   echo  string   x        Outputs  abcdef  Reverse Direction   while    len   echo  string  -- len      Outputs  fedcba

[php] PHP - iterate on string characters

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