How to get the first character of string in php

Question

I need to get the first character of the given string. here i have a name in the session variable. i am passing the variable value to the substr to get the first character of the string. but i couldn't.

i want to get the first character of that string.

for example John doe. i want to get the first character of the string j. how can i get it using php?

  <?php
      $username = $_SESSION['my_name'];
      $fstchar = substr($username, -1);
  ?>

Answer 1

For the single-byte encoded (binary) strings:

substr($username, 0, 1);
// or 
$username[0] ?? null;

For the multi-byte encoded strings, such as UTF-8:

mb_substr($username, 0, 1);

Answer 2

Three Solutions Sorted by Robustness

1. mb_substr

It takes into consideration text encoding. Example:

$first_character = mb_substr($str, 0, 1)

2. substr

Example:

$first_character = substr($str, 0, 1);

3. Using brackets ([])

Avoid as it throws a notice in PHP 7.x and a warning in PHP 8.x if the string is empty. Example:

$first_character = $str[0];

Answer 3

In PHP 8 if you just need to check if the first character of a given string is equal to something, you can do it like this:

if (str_starts_with($s, $characterToCheck)) {
    // DO SOMETHING
}

Answer 4

If the problem is with the Cyrillic alphabet, then you need to use it like this:

mb_substr($username, 0, 1, "UTF-8");

Answer 5

Strings in PHP are array like, so simply

$username[0]

Answer 6

Strings can be seen as Char Arrays, and the way to access a position of an array is to use the [] operator, so there's no problem at all in using $str[0] (and I'm pretty sure is much faster than the substr method).

$fstchar = $username[0];

faster than all method

Answer 7

I do not have too much experience in php, but this may help you: substr