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Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:06:37 -0700
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Subject: Adding a more logical string slicing function to PHP
From: birken@gmail.com (Dan Birken)

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My apologizes if I am bringing up a topic that has been discussed before,
this is my first time wading into the PHP developers lists and I couldn't
find anything particularly relevant with the search.

Here is a bug I submitted over the weekend (
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=54387) with an attached patch that adds a
str_slice() function into PHP.  This function is just a very simple string
slicing function, with the logical interface of str_slice(string, start,
[end]).  It is of course meant to replace substr() as an interface for
string slicing.

I detailed the reasons I submitted the patch in the bug a little bit, but
the main reason is that I think the substr() function is really overly
confusing and just not an intuitive method of string slicing, which is
exceedingly common functionality.  I realize we don't want to go around
adding lots of random little functions into the language that don't offer
much, but the problem with that is that if we have a function like substr()
with an unusual and unintuitive interface, it becomes unchangeable due to
legacy issues and then you can never improve.  I think this particular
functionality is important enough to offer an updated interface.  In the bug
I also pointed to two related bugs that would be essentially fixed with this
patch.

-Dan

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