How Do I Extract the First Five Characters from a String in PHP?

Retrieving the First Five Characters from a String in PHP

When working with strings in PHP, it may be necessary to retrieve only a specific portion of the characters. In this instance, you may want to acquire the first five characters of a given string.

Solution

To accomplish this task, two functions can be utilized depending on the type of string being handled:

• Single-byte strings: For strings encoded using single-byte character sets such as US-ASCII or ISO 8859, the substr function can be applied:

  <code class="php">// Single-byte string
  $myStr = "Hello";
  $result = substr($myStr, 0, 5); // Retrieve the first 5 characters</code>

• Multi-byte strings: For strings encoded using multi-byte character sets such as UTF-8 or UTF-16, the mb_substr function should be used:

<code class="php">// Multi-byte string
$myStr = "你好";
$result = mb_substr($myStr, 0, 5, 'UTF-8'); // Retrieve the first 5 characters</code>

In both instances, the result will be a substring containing the first five characters. This technique can be employed for various string manipulation tasks during development.

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