Get the last character of a string in PHP

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the last character of a string 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.

Negative indexes are used to access the characters from the end of a string.

Consider, we have a following string:

$place="paris";

Now, we want to get the last character s from the above string.

To get the last character of a string in PHP, we can use the square brackets syntax $string[] by passing the index of an last element that is -1.

-1 is same as strlen($string)-1.

Here is an example:

$place="paris";
$result = $place[-1];
echo $result;

Output:

"s"

Alternatively, we can also use the substr() function in PHP to get the last character of a string.

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.

Here is an example:

$place="paris";
$result = substr($place, -1);
echo $result;

Output:

"s"

In the example above, we have passed -1 as second argument to the substr() function. so it begins the extraction at index -1 and goes upto to the end of a string.

Where -1 is index of last character, so it stops there.

Note: If only start posisiton is given, then the extraction starts at that index and extracts upto to the end of a string.

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