PHP: Read out n-th Character from behind of String

In principle, you have several possibilities to cut out this character from your string.

Here is an example of how to read out the desired character using square brackets:

$s = $abcdef;

echo $s[strlen($s)-1]; // f
echo $s[strlen($s)-2]; // e
echo $s[strlen($s)-3]; // d

In order to get the characters from behind, first we are calculating the  entire length of the string using strlen($s) and we are subtracting the corresponding position from behind from the result. As an example, "strlen($s)-1" gives us the last position, "strlen($s)-2" is providing the last but not least position and so on.

Another way is to use the function substr() which is returning a sub-string from the string we have passed to the function. Here is another example for that:

$s = $abcdef;

echo substr($s, -1, 1); // f
echo substr($s, -2, 1); // e
echo substr($s, -3, 1); // d

The result is the same as from the first example. As the first parameter, we are passing the input string to substr(). Than the starting position of the desired part of the string from behind (we can do that by using negative values). As third parameter, we have to specify the length of the substring. In this case, that is always 1, because we are interested in exactly one character.
2015-07-13 at 23:36