Wordwrap and Some Useful PHP String Features

PHP String with Security Considerations - Part 9

Foreword: In this part of the series I talk about the Wordwrap and Some Useful PHP String Features.

By: Chrysanthus Date Published: 29 Oct 2018

Introduction

This is part 9 of my series, PHP String with Security Considerations. In this part of the series I talk about the Wordwrap and Some Useful PHP String Features. You should have read the previous parts of the series before coming here, as this is the continuation.

Text Wrap
Assume that you have a paragraph of text, and there is no newline (n) character. You can break the paragraph into more lines using n. A line should be broken at a word boundary. A single string is returned with more lines. You should set the number of characters at or just before the number at which the line should be broken. The default line break separator is n, but you can also set (change) it.

To achieve all that, use the wordwrap() function, whose syntax is:

 string wordwrap ( string $str [, int $width = 75 [, string $break = "n" [, bool $cut = FALSE ]]] )

The function wraps a string to a given number of characters using a string break character. It returns the given string, wrapped to the specified length.

$str
 The input string.
$width
 The number of characters at which the string will be wrapped.
$break
 The line is broken using the optional break parameter; default is n.
$cut
 If the cut is set to TRUE, the string is always wrapped at or before the specified width. So if you have a word that goes beyond the given width, it is broken apart (see second example below). When FALSE the function does not split the word (even if the width is smaller than the word width).

Try the following code, which wraps the string to not more than 20 characters per line. The string break argument of rn is used.

<?php

 $str = 'The quick brown foxes jumped over the lazy dogs.';

 $ret = wordwrap ($str, 20, "rn");

 echo $ret;

?>

You have to use double quotes for the string break arguments and not single quotes. The output should be:

 The quick brown
 foxes jumped over
 the lazy dogs.

In the following example, a word is broken, because $cut is set to true.

<?php

 $str = 'A very long woooooooooooord.';

 $ret = wordwrap ($str, 8, "n", true);

 echo $ret;

?>

The output is:

 A very
 long
 wooooooo
 ooooord.

The echo Function
This function ouputs one or more strings. The syntax is:

 void echo ( string $arg1 [, string $... ] )

It returns void (empty).

It can be used without brackets, such as in:

 echo $ret, ' ';

Here, ' ' sends the cursor at the output to the next line below. With brackets, this statement would be:

 echo ($ret, ' '); //which did not work in my computer.

The arguments to the echo function are strings (numbers will become strings). You can also join its arguments with the dot operator, as in

 echo $ret . ' ';

Try the following code:

<?php

 $str = 'I like PHP :)';

 echo $str, ' ';
 echo $str . ' ';

?>

The output is:

 I like PHP :)
 I like PHP :)

The number of arguments for the function can be more than two.

Here is a quotation from the PHP manual:

"echo is not actually a function (it is a language construct), so you are not required to use parentheses with it. echo (unlike some other language constructs) does not behave like a function, so it cannot always be used in the context of a function. Additionally, if you want to pass more than one parameter to echo, the parameters must not be enclosed within parentheses."

That is it for this part of the series. We take a break here, and continue in the next part.

Chrys

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Wordwrap and Some Useful PHP String Features

PHP String with Security Considerations - Part 9

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