Get the last digit of a number in PHP

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

In PHP, strings are the sequence of characters, where the index of a 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 in PHP.

Consider, we have a following number:

$pincode=23254;

To get the last digit of a number:

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

2. Use the square brackets syntax $string[-1] to access the last character of a string.

3. Convert the result back to a number to get the last digit of the number.

Here is an example:

$pincode=23254;
$str = (string)$pincode; # int to string
# accessing the last character then string to int
$result = (int)$str[-1];
echo $result;

Output:

4

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

You can access the characters of a string, by using the square brackets syntax and specifying an index.

-1 is the index of a last character in the string.

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

The substr() function accepts three arguments, the last 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:

$pincode=23254;
$str = (string)$pincode;
$result = (int)substr($str, -1);
echo $result;

Output:

4

In the example above, we have passed -1 as second argument to the substr() function. so it returns the character at index -1 that is 4.

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