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Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:28:05 +0200
Message-ID: <AANLkTiniQfa7PCGr2vyFrQ3VkLUccXanf83z=V_JKoF0@mail.gmail.com>
To: Josh Davis <phpwnd@gmail.com>, internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=0016e64607222ded19049fb3fce9
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Adding a more logical string slicing function to PHP
From: landeholm@gmail.com (Hannes Landeholm)

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"This thread shouldn't be a criticism of substr(), it would be
pointless. Its signature and behaviour will never change, unless
perhaps around April 1st as a practical joke on the millions of
websites it would break."

That's a really good joke actually. I can imagine how angry people would
get. Maybe PHP could post it as a fake news update tomorrow?

And yeah, I wouldn't mind an extra string slicing function although I think
substr is sufficient... and if you're adding extra string functions there
are more useful ones. These are the string functions in my PHP framework
that I use regularly:

// Already mentioned:
starts_with($subject, $prefix) // returns bool
ends_with($subject, $tail) // returns bool
// Generating codes/ids:
random_str($length = 16) // returns any string
random_hex_str($length = 16) // returns any 0-9a-f
random_alphanum_str($length = 16, $case_sensitive = true) // returns any
a-z0-9/A-Z0-9
from_index($index) // 0 returns a, 1 returns b .. 3 => c..  n => z.. n + 1
=> aa..  n + 2 => ab...
// like base64 but only uses 0-9a-z (it encodes / as ad, + as ac and a as
ab)
base64_alphanum_encode($data)
base64_alphanum_decode($str)
// hex encodes string (eg. "\x11\x1c" => "111c")
hex_encode($str)
hex_decode($str)
email_validate($email) // regex email validation (the actual regex is 390
characters and has never failed me... don't ask me how it works though)
http_url_validate($url)
in_range($string, $min = -1, $max = -1) // returns true if string has a
certain length (easier to read and faster to write)
quote($string) // for exporting any string to javascript escaping any escape
or control characters automatically (e.g. \n) so "foo\"bar" becomes exactly
that

~Hannes


On 30 March 2011 16:08, Josh Davis <phpwnd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 30 March 2011 15:05, Hannes Landeholm <landeholm@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Parsing is a problem in many real-world
> > problems and substr currently works great for that purpose.
>
> That's funny because the first thing I thought when I read the
> original mail was "oh that would be great for parsing." In fact, I've
> just grep'ed through some code from a rich text parser I've been
> working on and at first glance there are at ~5 occurences of substr()
> that I would replace with str_slice(). There are also 15+ occurences
> of substr() that would remain untouched. It's not black-and-white,
> sometimes you want N characters starting from pos X, and other times
> you want to cut the text from pos X and pos Y, and that's where
> str_slice() would be welcome.
>
> This thread shouldn't be a criticism of substr(), it would be
> pointless. Its signature and behaviour will never change, unless
> perhaps around April 1st as a practical joke on the millions of
> websites it would break. The question is: is str_slice() useful, does
> it fill a need and should it be included into PHP?
>
> -JD
>

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