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

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

Consider, we have a following string:

$place="paris";

Now, we want to remove the last 2 characters is 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 last character index is -1, etc.

Removing the last n characters

To remove the last 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.

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

$place="paris";
$result = substr($place, 0, -2);
echo $result;

Output:

"par"

In the example above, we have passed 0, -2 as a second and third arguments to the substr() function. so it begins the extraction at index 0 and extracts before the last 2 characters of a string.

Note: If a length is given in negative number then characters are removed from the end of a string.

The substr() function doesn’t mutate the original string.