How to get first n characters of a string in PHP

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first n characters of a string in PHP.

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 etc.

Get the first n characters of a string

To get the first n characters of a string, we can use the built-in substr() function in PHP.

Here is an example, that gets the first 3 characters from a following string:

<?php
echo substr("Google", 0, 3);
?>

Output:

"Goo"

In the example above, we have passed 0, 3 as an arguments to the substr() function. So, it begins the extraction at index 0 and extracts before the 3rd character of a string.

Syntax : substr(string, start, length)

The second argument is start index and third argument is length that means how many characters you need to get from the start index.