How to get the last char of a string in PHP?

Question

I need to get the last character of a string. Say I have \"testers\" as input string and I want the result to be \"s\". how can I do that in PHP?

Answer 1

A string in different languages including C sharp and PHP is also considered an array of characters.

Knowing that in theory array operations should be faster than string ones you could do,

$foo = "bar";


$lastChar = strlen($foo) -1;
echo $foo[$lastChar];

$firstChar = 0;
echo $foo[$firstChar];

However, standard array functions like

count();

will not work on a string.

Answer 2

I can't leave comments, but in regard to FastTrack's answer, also remember that the line ending may be only single character. I would suggest

substr(trim($string), -1)

EDIT: My code below was edited by someone, making it not do what I indicated. I have restored my original code and changed the wording to make it more clear.

trim (or rtrim) will remove all whitespace, so if you do need to check for a space, tab, or other whitespace, manually replace the various line endings first:

$order = array("\r\n", "\n", "\r");
$string = str_replace($order, '', $string);
$lastchar = substr($string, -1);

Answer 3

Use substr() with a negative number for the 2nd argument.$newstring = substr($string1, -1);

Answer 4

I'd advise to go for Gordon's solution as it is more performant than substr():

<?php 

$string = 'abcdef';
$repetitions = 10000000;

echo "\n\n";
echo "----------------------------------\n";
echo $repetitions . " repetitions...\n";
echo "----------------------------------\n";
echo "\n\n";

$start = microtime(true);
for($i=0; $i<$repetitions; $i++)
    $x = substr($string, -1);

echo "substr() took " . (microtime(true) - $start) . "seconds\n";

$start = microtime(true);
for($i=0; $i<$repetitions; $i++)
    $x = $string[strlen($string)-1];

echo "array access took " . (microtime(true) - $start) . "seconds\n";

die();

outputs something like

 ---------------------------------- 
 10000000 repetitions...
 ----------------------------------

 substr() took 2.0285921096802seconds 
 array access took 1.7474739551544seconds

Answer 5

You can find last character using php many ways like substr() and mb_substr().

If you’re using multibyte character encodings like UTF-8, use mb_substr instead of substr

Here i can show you both example:

<?php
    echo substr("testers", -1);
    echo mb_substr("testers", -1);
?>

LIVE DEMO

Answer 6

Siemano, get only php files from selected directory:

$dir    = '/home/zetdoa/ftp/domeny/MY_DOMAIN/projekty/project';
$files = scandir($dir, 1);


foreach($files as $file){
  $n = substr($file, -3);
  if($n == 'php'){
    echo $file.'<br />';
  }
}