Question

I need to invent my own conversion function because of some encoding issue.
I decided that for now I will create a conversion table for my characters.

I want to know how I can possibly do an operation like the following C code to print out characters ‘a’ to ‘z’:

char a='a';
for(i=0;i<26;i++){ 
  printf("%c",a);
}

How can I do that (incrementing characters value by value) in PHP ?

Answer 1

Variables containing characters can be incremented in PHP exactly as in C:

<?php

for ($i = 'a'; $i < 'z'; ++$i) echo $i;

Additionally, PHP allows incrementing of strings:

$x = "abc";
echo ++$x; # abd

You can also use range:

echo implode(range('a', 'z')); # abcdef....

Finally, you can convert between character and numeric ASCII index via chr and ord. respectively.