Working with Strings - PHP

PHP has been taking the web by storm because of its power and versatility. If you'd like to add PHP-based applications to your web site, keep reading. This series of articles will teach you the language from scratch.

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By: James Payne

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October 29, 2007

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Now that we know how to print a string and create variables to hold strings, let's look at some ways to manipulate strings.

<html>

<body>

<?php

$first_name = "James";

$last_name = "Payne";

echo $first_name . " " . $last_name; concatenation

</body>

</html>

The above code is called concatenation and is used to join two things together (in this case, two words). The above code prints out the text:

James Payne

You will note the " " places a space between the words.

There are a ton of functions that let you goof around with strings in PHP, and I will write a tutorial on them in the near future.

In addition to toying with strings, you can also manipulate numeric data as well. To do this we use operators. Below is a giant list of the different operators available to you in PHP.

Symbol	What it Does	Type
+	Used for Addition	Arithmetic
-	Used for Subtraction	Arithmetic
*	Used for Multiplication	Arithmetic
/	Used for Dividing	Arithmetic
%	Used for Modulation	Arithmetic
++	Used to increase value by one	Arithmetic
--	Used to decrease value by one	Arithmetic
"="	Used to Assign a Value	Comparison
+=	Used to Add and Assign a Value	Comparison
-=	Used to Subtract and Assign a Value	Comparison
*=	Used to Multiply and Assign a Value	Comparison
/=	Used to Divide and Assign a Value	Comparison
.=	Decimals and Adds a Value	Comparison
%=	Used to Modulate and Add a Value	Comparison
"=="	Equal To	Comparison
!=	Not Equal To	Comparison
>	Greater Than	Comparison
<	Less Than	Comparison
>=	Greater Than or Equal To	Comparison
<=	Less Than or Equal To	Comparison
&&	Checks for more than one criteria	Logical
\|\|	Checks to see if at least one of a set of criteria is true	Logical
!	Checks to see if a criteria is not true	Logical

Well that's all the time we have for this tutorial. In our next episode, we will discuss how to use the various operators to further manipulate our data. If we have time we discuss Conditional Statements as well.

Till then...