Get the first character of a string in PHP

Get the first character of a string in PHP

To get the first character of a string, we can use the built-in substr() function by passing 0,1 as second and third arguments in PHP.

Syntax : substr(string, start, length)

Here is an example, that gets the first character H from the following string.

<?php
echo substr("Hello",0,1);
?>

Output:

H

Similarly, we can also use the mb_strimwidth() function in php.

Example:

<?php
echo mb_strimwidth("Cake",0,1);
?>

Output:

C

To use the mb_stringwidth() function you need to install a php-mbstring package using the following command and restart the apache.

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring