New in Symfony 5.1: String improvements

Use Stringable interface

Contributed by Nicolas Grekas in #36059

PHP 8 will be published in December 2020, but you can already use some of its features in your PHP applications thanks to the Symfony PHP 8 Polyfill. In Symfony 5.1 we use that polyfill to make all string objects implement the Stringable interface.

This will allow you to use union types such as string|Stringable in the future when you later upgrade to PHP 8.

Keep the last word when truncating

Contributed by Fran Moreno in #35649

When truncating text with the truncate() method, it's common to keep the last word unchanged, even if that means generating a string slightly longer than initially desired.

That is now possible thanks to a new optional argument called cut which is true by default. Set it to false to keep the last word unchanged:

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use function Symfony\Component\String\u;

u('Lorem Ipsum')->truncate(8, '…');        // 'Lorem I…'
u('Lorem Ipsum')->truncate(8, '…', false); // 'Lorem Ipsum'

Added a containsAny() method

Contributed by Nicolas Grekas in #35936

A common need when working with strings is to check if a given string contains some other string. That's why we added a new containsAny() method, which not only checks if a string contains another one, but it can also check if it contains at least one of all the given strings:

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use function Symfony\Component\String\u;

u('aeiou')->containsAny('a');                 // true
u('aeiou')->containsAny(['ab', 'efg']);       // false
u('aeiou')->containsAny(['eio', 'foo', 'z']); // true

Added a reverse() method

Contributed by Thomas Calvet in #35091

Another method added in Symfony 5.1 is reverse(), which flips the order of the string contents:

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use function Symfony\Component\String\u;

u('foo bar')->reverse(); // 'rab oof'
u('さよなら')->reverse(); // 'らなよさ'

Other improvements

• The slugger changes some special characters to generate better slugs. For example, it replaces @ by at. In Symfony 5.1 it will also replace & by and (this was contributed by Warxcell in #35689);
• We added a new s() helper to quickly create string objects without having to think if you need a u() (Unicode string) or a b() (Binary string) (this was contributed by Thomas Calvet in #35625);
• The width() method, which returns the width needed to display a character in the console, now follows the POSIX.1-2001 standard (this was contributed by Thomas Calvet in #35156).