PHP coding standards say:
… PHP holds the length property of each string, and that it
shouldn’t be calculated with strlen(). Write your functions in a such
a way so that they’ll take advantage of the length property, both
for efficiency and in order for them to be binary-safe. …
How can I access this length property? Or do I misunderstand it?
As Ignacio mentioned in another post:
That document is most likely about how to extend PHP’s engine, rather than programming in PHP itself.