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;
}