Substring extraction in PHP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Substring extraction

📖 Scenario: Imagine you have a list of book titles, and you want to extract a short preview from each title to show on a website.

🎯 Goal: You will create a PHP program that extracts a substring (a part of a string) from each book title to create a preview snippet.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an array of book titles

Set a variable for the length of the preview substring

Use a loop to extract the substring from each title

Print the preview snippets

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Extracting substrings is useful for showing previews or summaries of longer text, like book titles, article headlines, or product names on websites.

💼 Career

Many programming jobs require manipulating text data, and substring extraction is a common task in web development, data processing, and user interface design.

1

Create an array of book titles

Create an array called books with these exact titles: 'The Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', '1984', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Moby-Dick'.

PHP

# Create the array 'books' with the given titles
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create the array and separate each title with commas.

2

Set the preview length

Create a variable called previewLength and set it to 10 to define how many characters to extract from each title.

PHP

<?php
$books = ['The Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', '1984', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Moby-Dick'];
# Set 'previewLength' to 10
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the = sign to assign the number 10 to the variable previewLength.

3

Extract substrings from each title

Use a foreach loop with variable $title to go through $books. Inside the loop, create a variable $preview that uses substr($title, 0, $previewLength) to get the first 10 characters of each title.

PHP

<?php
$books = ['The Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', '1984', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Moby-Dick'];
$previewLength = 10;
# Use foreach loop to extract substring previews
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use foreach ($books as $title) to loop, and substr() to get the substring.

4

Print the preview snippets

Inside the foreach loop, add a print statement to display $preview followed by a newline using "\n".

PHP

<?php
$books = ['The Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', '1984', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Moby-Dick'];
$previewLength = 10;
foreach ($books as $title) {
    $preview = substr($title, 0, $previewLength);
    # Print the preview with a newline
    # Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use print($preview . "\n") to show each preview on its own line.