Padding a multibyte string with PHP

Published on 2024-09-21 • Modified on 2024-09-21

This snippet shows how to pad a multibyte string with PHP. This function was introduced in PHP 8.3. I don't have concrete use cases in mind, but we know it exists 🙂. Note that is doesn't work with Unicode symbols encoded with 8 bytes like flags 🇬🇧.

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<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Controller\Snippet;

/**
 * I am using a PHP trait to isolate each snippet in a file.
 * This code should be called from a Symfony controller extending AbstractController (as of Symfony 4.2)
 * or Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller (Symfony <= 4.1).
 * Services are injected in the main controller constructor.
 */
trait Snippet320Trait
{
    public function snippet320(): void
    {
        var_dump(mb_str_pad('🙂😊', 7, '🤓😎', STR_PAD_RIGHT));
        var_dump(mb_str_pad('🙂😊', 7, '🤓😎', STR_PAD_BOTH));
        var_dump(mb_str_pad('🎉', 3, '🙂', STR_PAD_LEFT));

        // That's it! 😁
    }
}

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