1.0 Introduction

The Internet is really about contact through language; it's not about bits, bytes, pointers, and arrays. In other lower-level languages, the parsers think in that language whereas you and your users think in terms of information or strings. Strings are a basic data type in PHP; therefore, you can find the substrings of strings, match strings and characters , and do many other things with strings that you cannot do in traditional, lower-level programming languages without specialized classes or libraries.

In this chapter, we discuss many common techniques used to manipulate strings, such as finding substrings and converting between an ASCII character (the letter "a") and its corresponding value (such as 97).