Re: Negative string offsets

On 20.06.2011 14:02, Robert Eisele wrote: > Negative string offsets is a wish and also an implementation of my running > PHP version for long. It operates in the same fashion like substr() with > negative offsets, but avoids the function call and is much smarter if one > single character has to be extracted: > > $str = "Hallo"; > > $str[0] == "H" > $str[-1] == "o"; > > If -6 is used as offset, the old warning is displayed because it's the first > undefined negative offset. > > The same thing for setting: > > $str[-1] = '0'; > $str[-4] = "4"; > > will result in "H4ll0" > > Would be glad to see this in 5.4 While this in itself is a good thing, I'd prefer to wait some more and get a well thought-through, full fledged solution supporting ranges i.e. $str[-1:2] or $str[-1,2]. I believe there were talks of such syntax a few years ago, maybe using {} instead of []. I mean, right now both [] and {} seem to work equally on strings and arrays, but changing {} to make it behave more like substr/array_slice might be a viable BC break (for the negative numbers that might exist in arrays that is). Cheers -- Jordi Boggiano @seldaek - http://nelm.io/jordi