The String Gear

An object oriented way to work with strings in PHP, with multibyte support baked in.

Credit & Inspiration

The original library https://github.com/danielstjules/Stringy The voku fork https://github.com/voku/Stringy

This version builds on voku's work. The main aim was to make the management of the code base easier by splitting the mountain of methods that make up the Stringy class into traits.

This does mean we have bumped the minimum PHP version to 5.4+

NOTE: There are also a few other changes, this is not an API compatible fork.

How to Install

Installation via composer is easy:

composer require gears/string

Then import the Str class into your script:

use Gears\String\Str;

OO and Chaining

The library offers OO method chaining, as seen below:

echo Str::s('fòô     bàř')->removeWhitespace()->swapCase(); // 'FÒÔ BÀŘ'

Gears\String\Str has a __toString() method, which returns the current string when the object is used in a string context, ie: (string) Str::s('foo')

Implemented Interfaces

Gears\String\Str implements the IteratorAggregate interface, meaning that foreach can be used with an instance of the class:

$str = Str::s('fòôbàř');
foreach ($str as $char) {
    echo $char;
}
// 'fòôbàř'

It implements the Countable interface, enabling the use of count() to retrieve the number of characters in the string:

$str = Str::s('fòô');
count($str);  // 3

Furthermore, the ArrayAccess interface has been implemented. As a result, isset() can be used to check if a character at a specific index exists. And since Gears\String\Str is immutable, any call to offsetSet or offsetUnset will throw an exception. offsetGet has been implemented, however, and accepts both positive and negative indexes. Invalid indexes result in an OutOfBoundsException.

$str = Str::s('bàř');
echo $str[2];     // 'ř'
echo $str[-2];    // 'à'
isset($str[-4]);  // false

$str[3];          // OutOfBoundsException
$str[2] = 'a';    // Exception

The Methods

All methods are documented with PSR-5 docblocks that provide autocomplete hints to any decent IDE such as PHP Storm or Atom with atom-autocomplete-php.

Developed by Brad Jones - brad@bjc.id.au