5 Underused PHP Functions

PHP, over the years, has evolved into a vast language with many useful functions that are overlooked. Here’s 5 functions that you have probably never used to help make your next web application easier to create.

wordwrap()

wordwrap() will, as the name suggests, wrap words. After a specified amount of characters you can separate words with characters you choose. Here’s the basic format:

wordwrap($string, $char, $separator);

Example:

$string = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.";
echo wordwrap($string, 50, "\n");
/* Outputs:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
*/

money_format()

money_format() is a useful function which will let you format a number to be displayed like money. The PHP manual shows the available formatting options.

Example:

$amount = 9999.99;
setlocale(LC_MONETARY, 'en_US');
echo money_format("%n", $amount); // Outputs "USD 9,999.99"

similar_text()

similar_text() allows you to figure out how similar two strings are. Here’s the way you call it:

similar_text($string1, $string2, $refvar);

$refvar will be assigned to the percent similarity of the two strings. 100 being that they’re the same and 0 being that they’re nothing alike.

Example:

similar_text("html", "tricks", $ref);
echo $ref; // Outputs 20
similar_text("html", "xml", $ref);
echo $ref; // Outputs 57.142857142857
similar_text("html", "html", $ref);
echo $ref; // Outputs 100

highlight_string()

highlight_string() provides syntax highlighting for PHP code. It’s very easy to use:

highlight_string($code);

Example:

$code = '<?php
echo $x . "hello, world!";
?>';
highlight_string($code);

This example would output the following:

<?php
echo $x . "hello, world!";
?>



metaphone()

Last but not least, metaphone() takes a string and returns an approximate pronunciation of it.

Example:

echo metaphone('tricks'); // Outputs "TRKS"
echo metaphone('website'); // Outputs "WBST"

Are we missing any functions? Share any obscure but useful PHP functions that you know about in a comment below. We hope these helped you!