PHP | Reverse a String

PHP serves us with many built-in methods which can be used to manipulate strings. In this article, we will learn about how to reverse a string using various methods available in PHP.

Examples:

Input : neveropen
Output : skeeGrofskeeG

Input : 12485
Output : 58421

Below we have discussed about three basic and most commonly used methods of reversing strings in PHP:

1. Reversing string using strrev(): The strrev() function is a built-in function available in PHP and is used to reverse strings. This function takes a string as argument and returns a reversed string.

   Syntax:

   strrev($string)

   Below is the implementation of program to reverse a string using strrev():

   
   

   
   
   

   <?php // PHP program to reverse a string using strrev()    function Reverse($str){     return strrev($str); }    // Driver Code $str = "neveropen"; echo Reverse($str) ?>

   Output:

   skeeGrofskeeG
   

2. Reversing string using recursion and substr(): We can also reverse a string using recursion and substr() function. The substr() function is used to get a substring of the original string. Here we have defined a function Reverse() with the string passed as argument. During every recursive call, we have used the substr() method to extract the first character of argument string and called the Reverse() function again by passing remaining part of string as argument and concatenated the first character at the end of the string returned from current call.

   Below is the implementation of above idea:

   
   

   
   
   

   <?php    // PHP function to reverse a string using  // recursion and substr() function Reverse($str){            // strlen() used to calculate the      // length of the string     $len = strlen($str);        // Base case for recursion     if($len == 1){         return $str;     }     else{         $len--;                    // extract first character and concatenate         // at end of string returned from recursive         // call on remaining string         return Reverse(substr($str,1, $len))                          . substr($str, 0, 1);     } }    // Driver Code $str = "neveropen"; print_r(Reverse($str));    ?>

   Output:

   skeeGrofskeeG
   

3. In-place reversing a string without using library functions: In-place reversal of string means to reverse the string by doing modification in the original string itself and not making any copy of the original string. We can reverse a string in-place and without using any library function in PHP. The idea to do so is to traverse the original string from both sides, i.e. from both left and right until we reach the middle of the string. And keep swapping the characters while traversing. So, we will simply swap the characters, starting with the first and last, then second-first and second-last and so on, till we reach the middle of the string.

   Below is the implementation of above idea:

   
   

   
   
   

   <?php // PHP function to in place reverse a string  // without using library functions    function Reverse($str){     for($i=strlen($str)-1, $j=0; $j<$i; $i--, $j++)      {         $temp = $str[$i];         $str[$i] = $str[$j];         $str[$j] = $temp;     }     return $str; }    // Driver Code $str = "neveropen"; print_r(Reverse($str)); ?>

   Output:

   skeeGrofskeeG