Decrement character with php

Question

Why is it that it's ok to increment character but not decrement with PHP?

PHP

<?php
    $a = "a";
    echo $a. "<br>";  //a
    echo ++$a. "<br>";  //b
    echo --$a. "<br>";  //b
>

Is there a simple way as --$ato decrement a charrater?

There was a solution by using chr.

Answer 1

There is no direct way to decrement alphabets. But with a simple function you can achieve it:

function decrementLetter($Alphabet) {
    return chr(ord($Alphabet) - 1);
}

Source, thanks to Ryan O'Hara

Answer 2

There is no simple way, especially if you start with multi-character strings like 'AA'.

As far as I can ascertain, the PHP Internals team couldn't decide what to do when

$x = 'A';
$x--;

so they simply decided not to bother implementing the character decrementor logic