What are some best practices for manipulating strings as arrays in PHP?

When manipulating strings as arrays in PHP, it is important to remember that PHP treats strings as arrays of characters. To access individual characters or substrings within a string, you can use array access syntax or functions like substr(). Be mindful of string indexes starting at 0 and use functions like strlen() to get the length of a string.

// Example: Accessing individual characters in a string
$string = "Hello, World!";
echo $string[0]; // Output: H
echo $string[7]; // Output: W

// Example: Getting a substring from a string
$substring = substr($string, 7, 5);
echo $substring; // Output: World