How to remove the leading character from a string?

I have a input string like:

$str = ':this is a applepie :) ';

How can I remove the first occurring : with PHP?

Desired output: this is a applepie :)

The substr() function will probably help you here:

 $str = substr($str, 1);

Strings are indexed starting from 0, and this functions second parameter takes the cutstart. So make that 1, and the first char is gone.

To remove every : from the beginning of a string, you can use ltrim:

$str = '::f:o:';
$str = ltrim($str, ':');
var_dump($str); //=> 'f:o:'

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