Remove a part of a string, but only when it is at the end of the string

I need to remove a substring of a string, but only when it is at the END of the string.

for example, removing 'string' at the end of the following strings :

"this is a test string" ->  "this is a test "
"this string is a test string" - > "this string is a test "
"this string is a test" -> "this string is a test"

Any idea's ? Probably some kind of preg_replace, but how??

Solution 1:

You'll note the use of the $ character, which denotes the end of a string:

$new_str = preg_replace('/string$/', '', $str);

If the string is a user supplied variable, it is a good idea to run it through preg_quote first:

$remove = $_GET['remove']; // or whatever the case may be
$new_str = preg_replace('/'. preg_quote($remove, '/') . '$/', '', $str);

Solution 2:

Using regexp may fails if the substring has special characters.

The following will work with any strings:

$substring = 'string';
$str = "this string is a test string";
if (substr($str,-strlen($substring))===$substring) $str = substr($str, 0, strlen($str)-strlen($substring));

Solution 3:

I wrote these two function for left and right trim of a string:

/**
 * @param string    $str           Original string
 * @param string    $needle        String to trim from the end of $str
 * @param bool|true $caseSensitive Perform case sensitive matching, defaults to true
 * @return string Trimmed string
 */
function rightTrim($str, $needle, $caseSensitive = true)
{
    $strPosFunction = $caseSensitive ? "strpos" : "stripos";
    if ($strPosFunction($str, $needle, strlen($str) - strlen($needle)) !== false) {
        $str = substr($str, 0, -strlen($needle));
    }
    return $str;
}

/**
 * @param string    $str           Original string
 * @param string    $needle        String to trim from the beginning of $str
 * @param bool|true $caseSensitive Perform case sensitive matching, defaults to true
 * @return string Trimmed string
 */
function leftTrim($str, $needle, $caseSensitive = true)
{
    $strPosFunction = $caseSensitive ? "strpos" : "stripos";
    if ($strPosFunction($str, $needle) === 0) {
        $str = substr($str, strlen($needle));
    }
    return $str;
}