Mirrored Alphabet, Spaces in PHP

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⏱️ 7 min read
📚 Updated: Aug 2025
🎯 2 Code Examples
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Mirrored alphabet pattern A..E with spaces between left and right halves in PHP

What You'll Learn

This pattern prints letters on the left, a shrinking space gap, then the mirrored letters on the right. The last row touches in the center as ABCDEEDCBA.

⭐ Pattern Output

Five rows from A to E:

Output
A        A
AB      BA
ABC    CBA
ABCD  DCBA
ABCDEEDCBA
1

Complete PHP Program (A–E)

Fixed version (5 rows). Each row does two full-width passes and prints a space slot when the condition fails.

PHP
<?php
$alpha = range('A', 'Z');
$rows = 5; // A..E
$end = $rows - 1;

for ($i = 0; $i < $rows; $i++) {
    // Left pass: A..E, print letters up to i
    for ($j = 0; $j <= $end; $j++) {
        echo ($j <= $i) ? $alpha[$j] : ' ';
    }

    // Right pass: E..A, print letters from i down to A
    for ($k = $end; $k >= 0; $k--) {
        echo ($k > $i) ? ' ' : $alpha[$k];
    }

    echo PHP_EOL;
}

🧠 How It Works

1

Outer loop controls the peak

Row $i is the peak index. Left side prints A..alpha[i]; right side mirrors back down.

2

Left pass: letters then spaces

While $j <= $i print the letter. After that, print spaces to keep a fixed row width.

3

Right pass: spaces then letters

While $k > $i print spaces. Then print alpha[$k] down to A to mirror the left side.

4

Print the line break

After building one row, print PHP_EOL to move to the next line. This keeps the output readable in CLI output.

Newline
=

Put it together

The outer loop controls rows, the inner loops control what prints on each row, and PHP_EOL separates the lines.

2

Variation — User Input (CLI) Version

Reads rows from stdin and clamps to 26 (A–Z):

PHP
<?php
echo "Enter the number of rows (max 26): ";
$rows = (int) trim(fgets(STDIN));
$rows = max(1, min($rows, 26));

$alpha = range('A', 'Z');
$end = $rows - 1;

for ($i = 0; $i < $rows; $i++) {
    for ($j = 0; $j <= $end; $j++) {
        echo ($j <= $i) ? $alpha[$j] : ' ';
    }
    for ($k = $end; $k >= 0; $k--) {
        echo ($k > $i) ? ' ' : $alpha[$k];
    }
    echo PHP_EOL;
}

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

It creates an array of uppercase letters so you can print alphabets using simple numeric indexes (0 for A, 1 for B, ...).
PHP_EOL is correct for CLI output and keeps examples consistent for terminal execution. In HTML, you would use <br> instead.
Most pattern programs print O(n) characters per row for n rows, so they are typically O(n2).

Next: PHP Alphabet Pattern 20

Continue to the next program for another alphabet pattern in PHP.

Program 20 →

About the author

Mari Selvan M P
Mari Selvan M P 🔗

Developer, cloud engineer, and technical writer

  • Experience 12 years building web and cloud systems
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I write practical tutorials so students and working developers can learn by doing—from databases and APIs to deployment on AWS.

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