The strlen() function

The strlen() function

The strlen() function is used to return the length of a string.
Let's find the length of a string:

<?php echo strlen("Hello world!"); ?>

The output of the code above will be:

12

The length of a string is often used in loops or other functions, when it is important to know when the string ends. (i.e. in a loop, we would want to stop the loop after the last character in the string).

The strpos() function

The strpos() function is used to search for character within a string.
If a match is found, this function will return the position of the first match. If no match is found, it will return FALSE.
Let's see if we can find the string "world" in our string:

<?php echo strpos("Hello world!","world"); ?>

The output of the code above will be:

6

The position of the string "world" in our string is position 6. The reason that it is 6 (and not 7), is that the first position in the string is 0, and not 1.