Remove First 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, etc, Character From String PHP

In this tutorial, you will learn to remove the first 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, characters from string in PHP.

To Remove First Character From String PHP

Let’s use ltrim(), substr_replace() or substr() PHP function to remove first character from the string:

Method 1: substr function

You can use the substr function of PHP for remove the first character from string in PHP.

Here is syntax:

The syntax of subster method is given below:

substr($string);

Example1 – Method First – substr function

 $string = "Hello World!";
 echo "Given string: " . $string . "\n";
 echo "Updated string: " . substr($string, 1) . "\n"; 

Output-1

 Given string: Hello World!
 Updated string: ello World

Example2 – PHP substr function

Suppose you have one string like this “Hi, You are a good programmer.” . In this string you want to remove first three characters in PHP. So you can use the substr() function like this:

 $string = "Hi, You are a good programmer.";
 echo "Given string: " . $string . "\n";
 echo "Updated string: " . substr($string, 3) . "\n"; 

Using the above example2 of method substr, you can remove first n number of characters from string in PHP.

Output-2

 Given string: Hi, You are a good programmer.
 Updated string: You are a good programmer.

Method 2: ltrim() function

You can use the PHP ltrim() function to remove the first character from the given string in PHP.

Here is syntax:

The basic syntax of ltrim() function is:

ltrim($string,'h');

Here “h” is the character that you want to remove in your string.

Example – ltrim() function

 $string = "Hello World!";
 echo "Given string: " . $string . "\n";
 echo "Updated string: " . ltrim($string, "!") . "\n";

Output

 Given string: Hello World!
 Updated string: ello World 

Method 3: Using substr_replace() function

The substr_replace() function is used to replace a part of a string with another string:

$string = "Hello World!";
$newString = substr_replace($string, "", 0, 1);
echo $newString; // Output: "ello World!"

Conclusion

In PHP, removing the first character from a string is a simple task that can be accomplished using either the substr() function or the substr_replace() or ltrim() function.

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