In what situations would it be more efficient to manipulate text as a string rather than as an array in PHP?

When working with small, simple text manipulations, it may be more efficient to manipulate text as a string rather than as an array in PHP. This is because string manipulation functions in PHP are optimized for working with strings directly, making them faster and more efficient for simple tasks like concatenation, substring extraction, or replacing characters.

// Example of manipulating text as a string
$text = "Hello, World!";
$newText = str_replace("Hello", "Hi", $text);
echo $newText;