How to remove the first n characters of a string in PHP

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

Consider, we have a following string:

$place="paris";

Now, we want to remove the first 2 characters pa from the above string.

Note: In PHP, strings are the sequence of characters that can be accessed by using its character index, where the first character index is 0, second character is 1 and the first character index is -1, etc.

Removing the first n characters

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

The substr() function accepts three arguments, the first one is string, the second is start position, third is length (optional).

Here is an example, that removes the first 2 characters pa from the $place string:

$place="paris";
$result = substr($place, 2);
echo $result;

Output:

"ris"

In the example above, we have passed 2 as a second argument to the substr() function. so it begins the extraction at index 2, and extract the rest of a string.

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