This function shows its usefulness on a web site where a user is asked to entered a hexidecimal color code for a color. To prevent breaking W3C standard and having them enter in "neon-green" or the wrong type of code like 355511235.In conjunction with strlen() you could create a function like this:function check_valid_colorhex($colorCode) { // If user accidentally passed along the # sign, strip it off $colorCode = ltrim($colorCode, '#'); if ( ctype_xdigit($colorCode) && (strlen($colorCode) == 6 || strlen($colorCode) == 3)) return true; else return false;}