Return the portion of a string before the first occurrence of a character in php

Question

In PHP, what is the simplest way to return the portion of a string before the first occurrence of a specific character?

For example, if I have a string...

\"

Answer 1

How about this:

$string = "The quick brown fox jumped over the etc etc.";

$splitter = " ";

$pieces = explode($splitter, $string);

echo $pieces[0];

Answer 2

strstr() Find the first occurrence of a string. Returns part of haystack string starting from and including the first occurrence of needle to the end of haystack.

Third param: If TRUE, strstr() returns the part of the haystack before the first occurrence of the needle (excluding the needle).

$haystack  = 'The quick brown foxed jumped over the etc etc.';
$needle    = ' ';
echo strstr($haystack, $needle, true);

Prints The.

Answer 3

for googlers: strtok is better for that

echo strtok("The quick brown fox",  ' ');

Answer 4

You could do this:

$string = 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog';
$substring = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, ' '));

But I like this better:

list($firstWord) = explode(' ', $string);

Answer 5

To sum up there're 4 ways

strstr($str,' ',true);
strtok($str,' ');
explode(' ', $str)[0];  //slowest
substr($str, 0, strpos($str, ' '));

The difference is that if no delimiter found:

strstr returns false

strtok explode returns whole string

substr returns empty string

if unexpected troubles with multibyte appear then this example

$str = mb_strstr($str, 'и', true) ?: $str;