When it comes to any skill, reinforcing the basics can pave the way for a boundless future. Indeed, taking a step back and presenting simple topics promotes a better form of comprehension. Thus, today’s post focuses on one primordial PHP function: how to delete the first character of a string.
To accomplish this task, you should be familiar with PHP’s substr( $string, $start, [ $length ] )
function. When used with only the first two parameters, substr returns all characters in $string
from index $start
to strlen( $string ) - 1
(the end), inclusive. Note that the first index of a string is actually zero.
With this baseline knowledge, writing a function to delete the first character of a string becomes quite trivial. By passing in a value of one to the substr
function, the returned string will contain all characters except the first. Through this acknowledgment, a new PHP function may be created:
function deleteFirstChar( $string ) {
return substr( $string, 1 );
}
With the above function, you can delete the first character of any string by simply passing it as a parameter:
$newString = deleteFirstChar( $oldString );
If you are having trouble with any other PHP topics, make sure you take full advantage of the documentation.