README

The alphabet library is a means to standardize iterating over a given alphabet. It is useful for code that deals with encoding, cryptography or text manipulation.

Installation

composer require hylianshield/alphabet:^1.0

Usage

The alphabet constructor accepts 0 (zero) or more arguments, all of the type string.

The alphabet can function as an iterator and give you the number of entries.

<?php
use \HylianShield\Alphabet\Alphabet;

$alphabet = new Alphabet('A', 'B', 'C');

echo sprintf(
    'Found %d entries:',
    count($alphabet)
) . PHP_EOL;

foreach ($alphabet as $character) {
    echo $character . PHP_EOL;
}

Outputs:

Found 3 entries:
A
B
C

Alphabet unpacking

If the input of the alphabet exists in a PHP array, one can use argument unpacking to populate the alphabet:

<?php
use \HylianShield\Alphabet\Alphabet;

$input    = range('A', 'Z');
$alphabet = new Alphabet(...$input);

echo sprintf(
    'Alphabet consists of %d characters.',
    count($alphabet)
);

Outputs:

Alphabet consists of 26 characters.

Alphabet (de)normalization

When turning back the alphabet into a flat structure, one can use the built-in PHP function, iterator_to_array.

<?php
use \HylianShield\Alphabet\Alphabet;

/**
 * @var Alphabet $alphabet
 * @var string[] $normalized
 */
$normalized = iterator_to_array($alphabet, false);

// And to de-normalize the alphabet again, simply unpack the array.
$alphabet = new Alphabet(...$normalized);

The second argument to iterator_to_array is set to false, since the keys do not need to be interpreted and/or transformed. It is a small performance optimization.

Testing

To run the unit tests, to check the code, simply run one of the pre-configured composer scripts:

• composer test Runs PHPUnit
• composer coverage Runs PHPUnit with text coverage
• composer coverage-html Runs PHPUnit with HTML coverage and opens the result in the browser.