Get the first 2 digits of a number in PHP

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first 2 digits of a number in PHP with the help of examples.

In PHP, strings are the sequence of characters, where the index of the first character is 0, the second character is 1, third character is 3, last character index is -1 etc.

The Negative indexes (-1, -2 etc) are used to access the characters from the end of a string in PHP.

Consider, we have a following number:

$pincode=23254;

To get the first digits of a number:

1. Convert the number to a string by using the explicit type casting eg: string($pincode).

2. Use the substr() function to access the first 2 characters of a string.

3. Convert the result back to a number to get the first 2 digits of the number.

Here is an example:

$pincode=23254;
$str = (string)$pincode; # int to string
$result = (int)$substr($pincode, 0, 2);
echo $result;

Output:

23

In the example above,first we converted the number to a string, so that we can use the square brackets syntax on it.

We have passed the 0, 2 as a second and third arguments to the substr() function. so it begins the string extraction at index 0 and extracts upto 2 characters from that index.

The substr() function accepts three arguments, the first one is string, the second is start position, third is length.Then returns the specified part of a string from the start position.

The substr() function doesn’t mutate the original string, instead of creates a new string with the modified output.