How to find out if a hex color is light or dark with PHP

In this article we will learn how to find out if a hex color is light or dark in a very interesting way, using only pure PHP!

Hey you programmer, ok? Let’s learn more about PHP!

To check if a color is light or dark, we can use a formula that is made available by the W3C, the web standardization body

The formula is this:

((Red value X 299) + (Green value X 587) + (Blue value X 114)) / 1000

The result of this operation is a value from 0 to 255, which is the lightness of a color

Note that this formula uses the values in RGB, so we need to convert the Hexadecimal to this value

For this action PHP also has specific functions, so it won’t be a problem

Remembering that a color is considered light when the value of this formula is greater than 128

So let’s take a practical example:

<?php

 $color = '#FFFFFF';
 $red = hexdec(substr($color, 1, 2));
 $green = hexdec(substr($color, 3, 2));
 $blue = hexdec(substr($color, 5, 2));
 $result = (($red * 299) + ($green * 587) + ($blue * 114)) / 1000;
 echo $result;

Here we are analyzing the white color (#FFFFFF) and we receive in the variable $result the maximum brightness value, which is 255

That is, this color is considered light

Also notice that we use substring to get the values we need to convert to RGB, where the first two places of the hex represent R, the two in the middle represent G and the final two represent A.

Pretty cool and easy right? 😀

Conclusion

In this article we learned  how to find out if a hex color is light or dark with PHP

We use a formula that is provided by the W3C, where if the result is greater than 128, the color will be considered light.

Also, as it asks for color values in RGB, we convert the hex to RGB before applying the formula with PHP’s hexdec function

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