Hour 13. Working with Strings

The World Wide Web is very much a plain text environment. No matter how rich Web content becomes, HTML lies behind it all. It is no accident, then, that PHP provides many functions with which you can format, investigate, and manipulate strings. As you might expect, MySQL also comes with its own set of string-related functions, which you will also learn about in this hour.

In this hour, you will learn

• How to format strings

• How to determine the length of a string

• How to find a substring within a string

• How to break a string down into component parts

• How to remove whitespace from the beginning or end of a string

• How to replace substrings

• How to change the case of a string

• How to use MySQL to put strings together or extract pieces of strings

• How to use MySQL to create variations of original strings

• How to use MySQL to find alternate representations of strings, in different bases