Php string get one char

PHP String in Array Only Returns First Character

For the next week, I’m stuck with a sadly very slow 1-bar EDGE internet connection, so forgive me if I didn’t spend quite enough time researching this one, but I just set up a local server for testing code that I would normally test over the internet, and it doesn’t seem to be working the same way on my local LAMP install. The issue is, when I do this:

echo strtolower($_REQUEST['page']); 

$page['name'] = strtolower($_REQUEST['page']); echo $page['name']; 

No, that’s not a typo, it consistently returns only the first letter of the string. Doing a var_dump($page) will result in string(5) «files» , but doing a var_dump($page[‘name’]) will result in string(1) «f» . I’m using PHP 5.2.1 . What is going on here?

3 Answers 3

You pretty much answered your own question. $page is «files» (as shown by your first var_dump ). This could be caused by the deprecated register_globals , or a manual approximation thereof. Given that,

is «f». This is because non-numeric strings are implicitly converted to 0 (!). You can reproduce this easily with:

$page = 'files'; echo $page['files']; 

I figured it out right before you posted this. Yes, $page was set to files, but I didn’t know that. Apparently the issue stems from a PHP setting that was turned on in my local installation but not the remote one which makes it so that if the GET variable «page» is set to files, $page will be set to files as well. Thanks for the help.

@AriX register_globals was on I suppose? Exactly the reason why you always need to initialize your variables properly and turn register_globals off.

Yes, it was register_globals, which I just turned off. I don’t know why it was on in the first place — I don’t remember turning it on, maybe it came by default with Mac XAMPP? Again, thanks!

Doing a var_dump($page) will result in string(5) «files»

This means the variable $page is a string, not as you seem to expect an array containing a string. You can use array-like offsets on strings as well to return a single character within the string. Through the magic of type casting $string[‘files’] is equivalent to $string[0] , which returns the first character.

Your problem is somewhere where you assign the string to $page , or somewhere after that were you turn it from an array into a single string. The code you provided should work as-is.

I suppose $page is already a string when you assign to $page[‘name’] , so you’re actually setting the first character of the string. Try to explicitly declare $page = array() .

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PHP: Get the first character in a string.

This is a short guide on how to get the first character of a string in PHP. As an added bonus, I will also show you how to get the first two characters of a string.

We used two different approaches here.

Using the first approach, we treat the string like an array. i.e. We use the index position of the character to access it. This is possible because strings in PHP can be treated like character arrays (basically, a string is just an array that consists of characters).

In the second approach, we used the PHP function substr, which returns a part of a string. With the substr function, there are three parameters:

1. The string in question.
2. The index to start at (we set this to 0 because we want to start at the very beginning of the string).
3. The length that we want to return (we set this to 1 because we only want the first character).

mb_substr and special characters.

If there is a chance that your string contains special characters such as “ö” or “ë”, then you will need to use the mb_substr function. This function is the multi-byte safe version of substr. If you use the substr on a string that contains special characters, then you might end up with jumbled characters and / or the black diamond question mark “replacement character”.

Example of mb_substr being used to get the first character of a string that contains special characters:

//Set the header to utf-8 for example purposes. header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); //Example string. $string = 'öëBC'; //Use mb_substr to get the first character. $firstChar = mb_substr($string, 0, 1, "UTF-8"); //Print out the first character. echo $firstChar;

Note that this function allows you to specify the encoding as a fourth parameter!

Anyway; hopefully you found this short tutorial helpful!

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Get first characters of a string in PHP

There are two primary ways to get the first characters of a string in PHP. For example, let’s say we have a description of an article but we want to trim it down to the first 30 characters to generate an excerpt.

Option 1: substr

To me, the easiest option is to use PHP’s substr function. Therefore, substr is my preferred method of getting the first characters of a string in PHP.

Per PHP’s documentation, the substr function allows you to return part of a string. The code example they provide is listed below:

substr ( string $string , int $start [, int $length ] ) : string

So, in the function below, 0 is the position where you want to start from and 30 is the number of characters that you would like to show from the start of the string.

$first_part_of_string = substr($string,0,30);

For example, in order to get the first 30 characters of our article description, we would run the following code. As you see below, I prefer to trim the description before running it through substr so that the result won’t have spaces at the beginning or end and I want to add an ellipsis at the end so my users know that there is more to read:

$description = 'This article is all about getting the first part of a string in PHP. We show you different PHP functions that get you there as quickly as possible. '; $excerpt = substr(trim($description),0,30).'. '; // this generates the following string - This article is all about gett. echo $excerpt;

Option 2: mb_strimwidth

A second way to return the first characters of a string in PHP is to use the mb_strimwidth function. This is listed as the second option because I don’t use it as regularly as I use the substr when I code, but it’s just as easy to use.

Per PHP’s documentation, the mb_strimwidth function allows you to get a truncated string with a specified width. A code example that they provide is visible below:

mb_strimwidth ( string $str , int $start , int $width [, string $trimmarker = "" [, string $encoding = mb_internal_encoding() ]] ) : string

In order to go from the start of the string to the following 30 characters, you need to replace int $start with 0 and replace int $width with 30. This looks like the following function:

$first_part_of_string = mb_strimwidth($string, 0, 30, '. ');

For our specific example, we want to return the excerpt of an article description. Again, I use the trim function to trim spaces from the beginning or end of the returned string and I use an ellipsis to show my users that there is more to read.

$description = 'This article is all about getting the first part of a string in PHP. We show you different PHP functions that get you there as quickly as possible. '; $excerpt = mb_strimwidth(trim($description), 0, 30).'. '; // this generates the following string - This article is all about gett. echo $excerpt;

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How to get the last char of a string in PHP?

I need to get the last character of a string. Say I have «testers» as input string and I want the result to be «s». how can I do that in PHP?

13 Answers 13

substr("testers", -1); // returns "s" 

mb_substr("multibyte string…", -1); // returns "…" 

You only need multibyte string functions if the string is evaluated as binary string. Aka, when php doesn’t know the encoding. Otherwise the typical non multibyte string functions will work just fine.

Note that this doesn’t work for multibyte strings. If you need to work with multibyte string, consider using the mb_* string family of functions.

As of PHP 7.1.0 negative numeric indices are also supported, e.g just $string[-1];

I think this is a better solution because it allows you to modify the character, whereas the substr solution given above does not.

; echo $silly[-3]; echo $silly[-15]; echo $silly[-13]; echo $silly[-1]; echo $silly[-4]; echo $silly; echo $silly[-4]; echo $silly[-8]; echo $silly; //  

 string(1) "e" $str[-3]='.'; var_dump($str); // => string(6) "abc.ef" var_dump(isset($str[-4])); // => bool(true) var_dump(isset($str[-10])); // => bool(false)