How to get everything after a certain character?
I've got a string and I'd like to get everything after a certain value. The string always starts off with a set of numbers and then an underscore. I'd like to get the rest of the string after the underscore. So for example if I have the following strings and what I'd like returned:
"123_String" -> "String"
"233718_This_is_a_string" -> "This_is_a_string"
"83_Another Example" -> "Another Example"
How can I go about doing something like this?
The strpos()
finds the offset of the underscore, then substr grabs everything from that index plus 1, onwards.
$data = "123_String";
$whatIWant = substr($data, strpos($data, "_") + 1);
echo $whatIWant;
If you also want to check if the underscore character (_
) exists in your string before trying to get it, you can use the following:
if (($pos = strpos($data, "_")) !== FALSE) {
$whatIWant = substr($data, $pos+1);
}
strtok
is an overlooked function for this sort of thing. It is meant to be quite fast.
$s = '233718_This_is_a_string';
$firstPart = strtok( $s, '_' );
$allTheRest = strtok( '' );
Empty string like this will force the rest of the string to be returned.
NB if there was nothing at all after the '_' you would get a FALSE
value for $allTheRest
which, as stated in the documentation, must be tested with ===, to distinguish from other falsy values.
Here is the method by using explode
:
$text = explode('_', '233718_This_is_a_string', 2)[1]; // Returns This_is_a_string
or:
$text = end((explode('_', '233718_This_is_a_string', 2)));
By specifying 2
for the limit
parameter in explode()
, it returns array with 2 maximum elements separated by the string delimiter. Returning 2nd element ([1]
), will give the rest of string.
Here is another one-liner by using strpos
(as suggested by @flu):
$needle = '233718_This_is_a_string';
$text = substr($needle, (strpos($needle, '_') ?: -1) + 1); // Returns This_is_a_string