PHP follows Perl"s convention when dealing with arithmetic operations on character variables and not C"s. For example, in Perl ‘Z"+1 turns into ‘AA", while in C ‘Z"+1 turns into ‘[‘ ( ord(‘Z") == 90, ord(‘[‘) == 91 ). Note that character variables can be incremented but not decremented and even so only plain ASCII characters (a-z and A-Z) are supported.