PHP: Read out first Character from String

Here are two examples showing two possibilities to extract the first character from a string:

$s = "abc";

echo $s[0];             // a
// or
echo substr($s, 0, 1);  // a

The first example shows how to access individual characters of a string using square brackets. The first character of a string has the position 0, so we can read out this character via $s[0].

The second possibility shown in the example, utilizes the PHP function substr() for the same purpose. As starting position (second parameter) of our desired substring we are passing the beginning of the input string (that is 0) and as number of characters to be extracted (third parameter) we are specifying 1 to get exactly the first character from the string.
Last update on 2024-01-16 | Created on 2015-06-28