Utility classes and functions

Overview of utility classes and functions for developers.

Drupal provides developers with a variety of utility functions that make it easier and more efficient to perform tasks that are either really common, tedious, or difficult. Utility functions help to reduce code duplication and should be used in place of one-off code whenever possible.

See also

common.inc

File interface

Formatting

PHP wrapper functions

Sanitization functions

Transliteration

Input validation

File

core/core.api.php, line 1551

Documentation landing page and topics, plus core library hooks.

Classes

Name	Location	Description
Crypt	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Crypt.php	Utility class for cryptographically-secure string handling routines.
DiffArray	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/DiffArray.php	Provides helpers to perform diffs on multi dimensional arrays.
Html	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Html.php	Provides DOMDocument helpers for parsing and serializing HTML strings.
Image	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Image.php	Provides helpers to operate on images.
NestedArray	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/NestedArray.php	Provides helpers to perform operations on nested arrays and array keys of variable depth.
Number	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Number.php	Provides helper methods for manipulating numbers.
OpCodeCache	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/OpCodeCache.php	Provides helpers to handle PHP opcode caches.
Random	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Random.php	Defines a utility class for creating random data.
Settings	core/lib/Drupal/Core/Site/Settings.php	Read only settings that are initialized with the class.
SortArray	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/SortArray.php	Provides generic array sorting helper methods.
Tags	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Tags.php	Defines a class that can explode and implode tags.
Timer	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Timer.php	Provides helpers to use timers throughout a request.
Unicode	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Unicode.php	Provides Unicode-related conversions and operations.
UrlHelper	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/UrlHelper.php	Helper class URL based methods.
UserAgent	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/UserAgent.php	Provides user agent related utility functions.
Variable	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Variable.php	Provides helpers for dealing with variables.
Xss	core/lib/Drupal/Component/Utility/Xss.php	Provides helper to filter for cross-site scripting.