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Getting Started

Requirements

Section titled “Requirements”

Babel requires PHP 8.2+ with the following extensions:

  • ext-intl (ICU transliteration)
  • ext-mbstring (multibyte string handling)
  • ext-iconv (encoding conversion)

Installation

Section titled “Installation”

Install Babel with composer:

Terminal window
composer require cline/babel

Basic Usage

Section titled “Basic Usage”

Create a Babel instance from any string:

use Cline\Babel\Babel;


$babel = Babel::from('Héllo Wörld');

Fluent Transformations

Section titled “Fluent Transformations”

Chain methods for complex transformations:

$slug = Babel::from('Héllo Wörld!')
    ->toAscii();  // "Hello World!"

Null Safety

Section titled “Null Safety”

Babel handles null values gracefully:

$babel = Babel::from(null);
$babel->isEmpty();     // true
$babel->toAscii();     // null
$babel->isUtf8();      // true (empty is valid UTF-8)

Immutability

Section titled “Immutability”

All transformation methods return new instances:

$original = Babel::from('Café');
$ascii = $original->toAscii();


$original->value();  // "Café" (unchanged)
$ascii;              // "Cafe"

Quick Examples

Section titled “Quick Examples”

Convert to ASCII

Section titled “Convert to ASCII”
Babel::from('Żółć')->toAscii();           // "Zolc"
Babel::from('北京')->toAscii();            // "bei jing"
Babel::from('Привет')->toAscii();          // "Privet"

Detect Scripts

Section titled “Detect Scripts”
Babel::from('Hello 世界')->containsChinese();   // true
Babel::from('Привет мир')->containsCyrillic();  // true
Babel::from('مرحبا')->isRtl();                  // true

Clean Strings

Section titled “Clean Strings”
Babel::from("Hello\x00World")->removeNonPrintable()->value();  // "HelloWorld"
Babel::from('Hello 👋')->removeEmoji()->value();                // "Hello "

Grapheme Operations

Section titled “Grapheme Operations”
// Split into grapheme clusters
Babel::from('Hello')->graphemes();  // ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']
Babel::from('café')->graphemes();   // ['c', 'a', 'f', 'é']


// Reverse preserving graphemes
Babel::from('café')->reverse()->value();  // "éfac"

Create Slugs

Section titled “Create Slugs”
Babel::from('Héllo Wörld!')->toSlug();  // "hello-world"

Next Steps

Section titled “Next Steps”