How do I remove everything after a space in PHP?

Question

I have a database that has names and I want to use PHP replace after the space on names, data example:

$x="Laura Smith";
$y="John. Smith"
$z="John Doe";

I want it to return

Laura
John.
John

Answer 1

There is no need to use regex, simply use the explode method.

$item = explode(" ", $x);
echo $item[0]; //Laura

Answer 2

You can do also like this

$str = preg_split ('/\s/',$x);
print $str[0];

Answer 3

Do this, this replaces anything after the space character. Can be used for dashes too:

$str=substr($str, 0, strrpos($str, ' '));

Answer 4

This answer will remove everything after the first space and not the last as in case of accepted answer.Using strpos and substr

$str = "CP hello jldjslf0";
$str = substr($str, 0, strpos( $str, ' '));
echo $str;

Answer 5

Just to add it into the mix, I recently learnt this technique:

list($s) = explode(' ',$s);

I just did a quick benchmark though, because I've not come across the strtok method before, and strtok is 25% quicker than my list/explode solution, on the example strings given.

Also, the longer/more delimited the initial string, the bigger the performance gap becomes. Give a block of 5000 words, and explode will make an array of 5000 elements. strtok will just take the first "element" and leave the rest in memory as a string.

So strtok wins for me.

$s = strtok($s,' ');

Answer 6

Try this

<?php
$x = "Laura Smith";
echo strtok($x, " "); // Laura
?>

strtok