PHP $string{0} vs. $string[0];

Question

In PHP you can access characters of strings in a few different ways, one of which is substr(). You can also access the Nth character in a string with curly or square braces, like so:

$string = 'hello';

echo $string{0}; // h
echo $string[0]; // h

My question is, is there a benefit of one over the other? What's the difference between {} and []?

Thanks.

Answer 1

use $string[0], the other method (braces) is being deprecated in PHP6 (src)

Note: Strings may also be accessed using braces, as in $str{42}, for the same purpose. However, this syntax is deprecated as of PHP 6. Use square brackets instead.