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Strings in PHP
By far, most problems a developer encounters involve the manipulation of strings. Especially when used in a web environment, nearly all input and output to a PHP script are simply strings. It is no surprise then to find that the number of string functions comprises, by far, the most of any of the standard extensions. In fact, string functions are actually found in a number of different extensions, such as the regular expression extensions.
Due to the wide variety of tasks that involve string manipulations, this chapter focuses on the most general string functions. More specialized issues, such as HTML character encoding, are handled in their respective chapters.