Show only names in the same variable

Question

I have a variable in PHP:

<p><?php echo $this->userInfo->name;?></p>

This will output their first and last name (i.e. Joe Bloggs)

I only want to display the first character of their first and last name (i.e. Joe B)

I can show the first character of their name and hide the rest by doing the following in CSS:

p {
    visibility: hidden;
}
p::first-letter {
    visibility: visible;
}

I thought I could use a function in PHP, something like this:

function abbreviateName($this->userInfo->name) {

      if($this->userInfo->name == "")
    return "";

 $tmp = explode(" ", $this->userInfo->name, 2)
      if(count($tmp)<=1) {
      return ucwords($tmp[0]).".";
 } else {
    $fn = ucwords($tmp[0]);
    $ln = ucwords(substr($tmp[1],0,1);
    return $fn.". ".$ln.".";
   }
}

But it doesn’t work

Answer 1

Assuming there is always a space, you can index from the beginning of the string to a substring after the space.

substr($this->userInfo->name, 0, strpos($this->userInfo->name, " ") + 2);

Answer 2

Okay, so I came up with a nice and simple solution:

[$first_name, $last_name] = explode(' ', $this->userInfo->name);

echo  $first_name . " " . substr($last_name, 0, 1);

Looks like it works great!