PHP get First Character of String

When working with strings in PHP, it is often necessary to get the first character of a string. So, In this article, we will discuss various ways to get the first character of a string in PHP.

Why do we need to get the first character of the string in php?

It can be useful in many cases. Here are a few reasons why you might want to do this:

Validation: If you’re expecting a certain type of input in your PHP script, you can check if your expectation matches by finding the first character of a string.
Formatting: If you are working with text data, you may want to format the first character of a string in a particular way. For example, you may want to capitalize the first letter of a name.
Substring manipulation: You may need to manipulate a substring that starts at the first character of a string. For example, you may want to extract the first word of a sentence, which can be done by getting the substring from the start of the string up to the first space character.

Overall, finding the first character of the string is a useful operation that can be used in many different scenarios.

3 Ways to get the first character of string

1. Using square brackets notation

In this method, we can get first character of string by using square brackets notation and setting the index ‘0’. The square brackets, [], are used to access individual characters in the string based on their position or index.

$str = "JOHN";
$first_char = $str[0];

echo $first_char

//Output : J

In this above code:

We have created the variable ‘str’ and initialized it to the string value ‘JOHN’.
Then we create another variable ‘first_char‘ for storing the first character of the ‘str‘ variable. And initialized to variable ‘str’ and pass the index value ‘0‘ inside the square bracket.
The number 0 inside the square brackets indicates that we want to access the first character in the string.
Finally, $first_char now contains the first character ‘J’ of the string variable ‘str’.

2. Using the substr() function

We should pass three parameters to the substr() function: the string to be manipulated, the starting index from which the substring should be extracted (in this case, 0), and the length of the substring to be extracted (in this case, 1).

$str= "Freedom";
$first_char = substr($str, 0, 1);

echo $first_char

//Output : F

In this code, we have assigned the variable ‘str’ to the value “Freedom”. The first character is ‘F’, so we find the first character using substr() function.
Then we used substr() function to extract a portion of this string, specifically the first character of the string.
We passed the first argument as variable ‘str‘, the second argument as ‘0‘, because we are finding the first character of the string so the first character of every string is at index ‘0’. And finally, we pass the third argument as ‘1′, because the length of the first character is ‘1’.
Finally, $first_char now contains the first character ‘F’ of the string variable ‘str’.

3. Using the str_split() function

In this method, we use the str_split() to split the string into an array of characters and then access the first element

$string = "Hello, world!";
$chars = str_split($string);
$first_char = $chars[0];

//Output : H

We have created the variable ‘string‘ and initialized it to the string value ‘Hello, world!’.
Then we create another variable called ‘chars’. In this case, str_split() function is used to split the string ‘$string’ into an array of individual characters. So, the variable $chars will now contain an array of characters.
Then we create the ‘first_char’ variable by accessing the element at index 0 of the array, which is assigned to the variable $first_char.
Finally, $first_char now contains the first character ‘H’ of the string variable ‘str’.