How can typecasting and substrings be used to manipulate numbers in PHP without relying on regex?

To manipulate numbers in PHP without relying on regex, you can use typecasting to convert strings to numbers and substrings to extract specific parts of a string. For example, if you have a string containing a number with extra characters, you can use typecasting to convert it to a number and substrings to remove the unwanted characters. This approach allows you to perform numerical operations on the manipulated numbers without the need for regex.

// Example: Manipulating a number in a string without regex
$string = "123abc";
$number = (int) substr($string, 0, strlen($string) - 3); // Typecast to integer and extract the numerical part
echo $number; // Output: 123