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PHP: What do the curly braces in $variable{0} do?

I was going through a codebase and came across a line I had a question about. It's something I haven't seen before and I was wondering if someone could explain it for me. Here's the code:

$variableName = $array[1];
$variableName{0} = strtolower($variableName{0});
$this->property = $variableName;

What are the curly braces being used for? I've used curly braces to define variables as variable names before, but is this the same thing? I can't seem to find any resources online that explain it, but I'm not sure if I'm searching for the right thing.

Solution

  • access the single byte with that index {0} => first char (in non-utf8 string)

    you could simply test it with:

    $var='hello';
echo $var{0};