How to access a character in a string by index in PHP
Jul 12, 2025 am 03:15 AMIn PHP, you can use square brackets or curly braces to obtain string specific index characters, but square brackets are recommended; the index starts from 0, and the access outside the range returns a null value and cannot be assigned a value; mb_substr is required to handle multi-byte characters. For example: $str = "hello"; echo $str[0]; output h; and Chinese characters such as mb_substr($str, 1, 1) need to obtain the correct result; in actual applications, the length of the string should be checked before iterating, dynamic strings need to verify the validity, and multilingual projects recommend using multi-byte security functions uniformly.
It is very simple to get characters at a specific index position in a string in PHP, and can be implemented directly using square brackets []
or curly brackets {}
. This is especially useful when processing strings, such as verifying input formats, extracting key information, etc.

Access characters with square brackets or curly braces
PHP's strings are essentially character arrays, so you can access each character through indexing just like an array. For example:
$str = "hello"; echo $str[0]; // Output h echo $str{1}; // Output e
Both methods work properly, but square brackets []
are more recommended because it is more common and conforms to the habits of most programming languages.

What should be noted is:
- The index starts at 0.
- If the index exceeds the length of the string, an error will not be reported, but a null value will be returned.
- Do not attempt to assign values ??to positions beyond the range of strings, as they may result in unexpected results.
Handle multi-byte characters such as Chinese
The above method is suitable for single-byte characters (such as English and numbers), but if the string contains Chinese or other Unicode characters, accessing directly with indexes may cause garbled or truncation errors.

At this time, you need to use functions in mbstring
extension to handle it:
$str = "Hello world"; $char = mb_substr($str, 1, 1); // Get the first character: "OK"
This method is safer and can correctly identify the boundaries of multibyte characters.
Several precautions in practical applications
When accessing characters one by one in a loop, remember to judge the length of the string first:
for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($str); $i ) { echo $str[$i]; }
If the string is dynamically obtained from user input or other sources, it is recommended to check whether it is empty or whether it is long enough to avoid errors.
For multilingual projects, try to use functions such as
mb_substr
that support multibyte characters as uniformly as possible to ensure compatibility.
Basically that's it. Although it seems simple, you will get stuck in the actual development if you are not careful, especially when dealing with non-English characters.
The above is the detailed content of How to access a character in a string by index in PHP. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

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