How to get the last char of a string in PHP?

I need to get the last character of a string. Say I have "testers" as input string and I want the result to be "s". how can I do that in PHP?

substr("testers", -1); // returns "s"

Or, for multibytes strings :

substr("multibyte string…", -1); // returns "…"

substr($string, -1) 

Or by direct string access:

$string[strlen($string)-1];

Note that this doesn't work for multibyte strings. If you need to work with multibyte string, consider using the mb_* string family of functions.

As of PHP 7.1.0 negative numeric indices are also supported, e.g just $string[-1];

From PHP 7.1 you can do this (Accepted rfc for negative string offsets):

<?php
$silly = 'Mary had a little lamb';
echo $silly[-20];
echo $silly{-6};
echo $silly[-3];
echo $silly[-15];
echo $silly[-13];
echo $silly[-1];
echo $silly[-4];
echo $silly{-10};
echo $silly[-4];
echo $silly[-8];
echo $silly{3}; // <-- this will be deprecated in PHP 7.4
die();

I'll let you guess the output.

Also, I added this to xenonite's performance code with these results:

substr() took 7.0334868431091seconds

array access took 2.3111131191254seconds

Direct string access (negative string offsets) took 1.7971360683441seconds