PHP Built-in Functions

PHP contains built-in functions for completing common (and some niche) tasks. This course will teach you how to find and use functions.

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Key Concepts

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PHP built-in functions

echo "I am built in";

PHP comes standard with many built-in functions. They give us an easier way to implement and repeat popular tasks throughout a program. A popular example is the echo function.

Many more are documented at https://www.php.net/docs.php. In addition to a description of what the function does, the documentation for each function denotes:

The name of the function
Required parameters and their types
Optional parameters (in square brackets, []), their types, and default values
The return type of the function (after the final colon, :)

Intro to Built-in PHP Functions

Lesson 1 of 1

1
Introduction
If you’ve been paying attention so far, you might have picked up a theme in programming—shortcuts. Defining our own functions gives us an easier way to repeat similar code throughout a program. B…
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2
Working with Variables
PHP includes useful built-in functions for getting information about variables. The gettype() function takes a variable as its argument and ret…
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3
String Functions
We can find PHP built-in functions to accomplish common tasks. Need to reverse a string? There’s a built-in function for that! The [strrev() function](https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strre…
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4
Working with Substrings
A substring is a portion of a string. For example, “hello” is a substring of the string “Oh hello, how are you?” and “el” is a substring of the string “hello”. Manipulating strings is very common…
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5
Number Functions
Another common task in programming is working with numbers, so it shouldn’t surprise us that PHP comes with some handy built-in functions for working with numbers. The [abs() function](https://ww…
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6
Generating Random Numbers
Generating random numbers may not seem obviously useful, but, as your programs become increasingly complicated, you’ll see this is actually a common task—for example to randomize data for testing. …
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7
Documentation
In order to understand built-in functions we’ve never used before, we’ll want to get comfortable understanding how they are represented in the documentation. Documentation typically includes: + The…
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8
Finding Functions
In order to find out about built-in functions (and other language features), you’ll want to get comfortable exploring the PHP documentation. The docs ca…
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9
Review
In this lesson, you learned that built-in functions are functions provided by PHP. You learned about several specific built-in functions, how to understand a function’s description in the documenta…
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