Question

I have two strings like this

$text = 'Abcdef';
$text[7] = 'Ghijk';

When I take the length of $text by

echo strlen($text);

The answer is 8. Can Any body describe how is it?

Answer 1

Take a simpler example to see what happens:

$text = 'a';
$text[2] = 'boo'; // now $text is "a b"

When PHP sees that we are accessing index 2 of the string whose length is 1 (with only valid index being 0), it extends the string by adding two spaces, so it makes the string 'a '.

Next the index operator [] deals with characters in the string. So your second statement replaces the 3rd character with a b, giving you a b