In this PHP tutorial, you shall learn how to loop through characters in a given string using str_split() function and foreach statement, or use the index of characters in the string with a For loop, with example programs.

PHP Loop through Characters in String

To iterate over each character in a string, there are following two approaches.

1 Using strsplit and foreach

  1. Take a string.
  2. Split the string into an array of characters using str_split() function.
  3. Use a looping statement like for loop or while loop, to iterate over each of the element (character) in the array.

2 Using index and for loop

  1. Take a string.
  2. Initialize index to 0.
  3. Define for loop that iterates when the index is less than string length.
    1. Access character using string and index.

Examples

1 For each character in string using strsplit and foreach

In this example, we will take a string, say “apple”, and iterate over each character of the string using str_split() function and foreach statement.

PHP Program

<?php
$str = "apple";
$chars = str_split($str);

foreach ($chars as $char) {
    echo $char;
    echo "<br>";
}
?>

Program Output

2 Iterate over characters in String using Index and For Loop

In this example, we will take a string, say “apple”, and iterate over each character of the string using index, that increments for each iteration, and for loop statement.

PHP Program

<?php
$str = "apple";

$length = strlen($str);
for ($index = 0; $index < $length; $index++) {
    echo $str[$index];
    echo "<br>";
}
?>

Program Output

Conclusion

In this PHP Tutorial, we learned how to iterate or loop for each character in a string, using different ways in PHP.