Remove characters from String before a character in PHP

This article, will discuss multiple ways to remove characters from string before a character in PHP.

Table Of Contents

Background

When dealing with string manipulation in PHP, you might encounter situations where you need to remove all characters from a string that appear before a certain character. For example, in a string like “abc:def:ghi”, if you want to remove everything before the first colon (:), the resulting string should be “:def:ghi”.

Solution 1: Using strstr()

The strstr() function is useful for finding the first occurrence of a substring in a string. By default, it returns the part of the string from the beginning of the substring to the end of the string. However, if you want to include the substring (the specific character) itself in the result, you can directly use strstr().

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
$originalString = "abc:def:ghi";

// Remove everything before the first colon
$resultString = strstr($originalString, ":");

// Display the result
echo $resultString;
?>

Output

:def:ghi

In this example, strstr($originalString, “:”) will find the first occurrence of “:” in $originalString and return the rest of the string from that point onwards, including the colon.

Solution 2: Using strpos() and substr()

Another approach involves using strpos() to find the position of the specific character and substr() to extract the part of the string from that character onwards.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
$originalString = "abc:def:ghi";

// Find the position of the first colon
$position = strpos($originalString, ":");

// Check if the colon was found
if ($position !== false) {
    // Extract the substring from the position of the colon
    $resultString = substr($originalString, $position);
} else {
    $resultString = $originalString; // or handle the absence of the colon
}

// Display the result
echo $resultString;
?>

Output

:def:ghi

Here, strpos($originalString, “:”) finds the position of the first occurrence of “:”. Then substr($originalString, $position) is used to get the substring starting from that position, including the colon.

Summary

To remove characters before a specific character in a PHP string, you can use strstr() to return the string from the first occurrence of that character, including the character itself. Alternatively, you can combine strpos() and substr() to find the character’s position and then extract the desired substring. Both methods are effective for this type of string manipulation, commonly required in parsing and formatting tasks in PHP.