An Introduction to Functions in PHP
Functions are a powerful way to write modular and reusable code. They can be used for a variety of tasks, such as array manipulation, string handling, math operations, internationalization, and many more. There are more than 1,000 built-in functions available for use in PHP, and additional ones may be added using extensions compiled with the language or other user-defined code. This article will provide an introduction to some of the most common PHP functions and how they work.
The ord() function in PHP is a useful tool for converting strings to ASCII values, and vice versa. It takes a single string parameter and returns its ASCII value as an integer. A string's ASCII value is the code it represents in the corresponding ASCII table, which is based on the binary representation of numbers: each digit is a power of 2 multiplied by a specific constant.
A more advanced function that works in the same way as ord() is mb_ord(), which uses the widely-used mbstring extension to perform this conversion. If the mbstring extension is not installed, it will use iconv instead.
The mb_ord() function can also take an optional $encoding parameter, which specifies the character encoding. If the parameter is omitted or null, the internal character encoding will be used. The function returns a Unicode code point value of the first character in the string or false on failure. This function is intended for use with multi-byte characters; it is recommended to use mb_chr() if you need to convert a single-byte string.