Remove portion of a string after a certain charact

Question

I'm just wondering how I could remove everything after a certain substring in PHP

ex:

Posted On April 6th By Some Dude

I'd like to have it so that it removes all the text including, and after, the sub string "By"

Thanks

Answer 1

Austin's answer works for your example case.

More generally, you would do well to look into the regular expression functions when the substring you're splitting on may differ between strings:

$variable = preg_replace('/By.*/', '', $variable);

Answer 2

How about using explode:

$input = 'Posted On April 6th By Some Dude';
$result = explode(' By',$input);
return $result[0];

Advantages:

• Very readable / comprehensible
• Returns the full string if the divider string (" By" in this example) is not present. (Won't return FALSE like some of the other answers.)
• Doesn't require any regex.
  • "Regular expressions are like a particularly spicy hot sauce – to be used in moderation and with restraint only when appropriate."
  • Regex is slower than explode (I assume preg_split is similar in speed to the other regex options suggested in other answers)
• Makes the second part of the string available too if you need it ($result[1] would return Some Dude in this example)

Answer 3

preg_replace offers one way:

$newText = preg_replace('/\bBy.*$/', '', $text);

Answer 4

By using regular expression: $string = preg_replace('/\s+By.*$/', '', $string)

Answer 5

You can use list and explode functions:

list($result) = explode("By", "Posted On April 6th By Some Dude", 2);
// $result is "Posted On April 6th "

Answer 6

Use the strstr function.

<?php
$myString = "Posted On April 6th By Some Dude";
$result = strstr($myString, 'By', true);

echo $result ;

The third parameter true tells the function to return everything before first occurrence of the second parameter.