Question

In PHP you can access characters of strings in a few different ways, one of which is substr(). You can also access the Nth character in a string with curly or square braces, like so:

$string = 'hello';  echo $string{0}; // h echo $string[0]; // h 

My question is, is there a benefit of one over the other? What’s the difference between {} and []?

Thanks.

Answer 1

use $string[0], the other method (braces) has been removed in PHP 8.0.

For strings:

Accessing characters within string literals using the {} syntax has been deprecated in PHP 7.4. This has been removed in PHP 8.0.

And for arrays:

Prior to PHP 8.0.0, square brackets and curly braces could be used interchangeably for accessing array elements (e.g. $array[42] and $array{42} would both do the same thing in the example above). The curly brace syntax was deprecated as of PHP 7.4.0 and no longer supported as of PHP 8.0.0.