Object orientated strings / numbers in PHP?

Question

I was looking at Ruby and it has a very nice OO structure unlike PHP with C-like string functions. I was wondering if there is an extension which makes strings into objects so you could use them like this:

$str = "sometext";
echo "len:" . $str->length; //would print 'len: 8'

Answer 1

Take a look at this...

http://code.google.com/p/php-string/downloads/detail?name=string.php&can=2&q=

The class supports the extensions mbstring and iconv, and the package PHP-UTF8. It chooses the best available function for each method In addition, it provides many new methods. Some of them are: substringBetween, splice, startWith, endsWith and squeeze. It is also possible to use PHP internal functions, or custom functions, to manipulate the string.

Sample Code:

<?php

include('string.php');

$str = new String('sometext');
echo $str->length; //prints 8
echo $str->getLength(); //prints 8

?>

I have never used this class before but by looking at its documentation it has some pretty interesting methods. capitalize, charAt, compareTo, contains, etc..

Answer 2

I'm a bit late to the game, but I was looking for a library just like this and came across this question. After more investigation I found the brilliant danielstjules/Stringy at GitHub.

I've looked over the documentation and the source and it looks pretty damn solid. I'd recommend taking a look at if you want a PHP String Wrapper class to make string manipulation easier. Note that this code is not a PHP extension, meaning there is no native manipulation, it is simply a wrapper.

A PHP string manipulation library with multibyte support. Compatible with PHP 5.3+, PHP 7, and HHVM.

A few examples:

s('Upper Camel-Case')->upperCamelize(); // 'UpperCamelCase'
s('What are your plans today?')->truncate(19, '...'); // 'What are your pl...'
s('foo & bar')->containsAll(['foo', 'bar']); // true
s('Ο συγγραφέας είπε')->countSubstr('α'); // 2

Answer 3

If you wanted to you could create your own String wrapper class that has all the string based methods and calculated attributes that you could possibly want. Edit: In the same way that Java has wrapper classes for some data types.