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

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 2

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

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

Answer 3

Try this

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

strtok

Answer 4

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

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

Answer 5

The method provided by TheBlackBenzKid is valid for the question - however when presented with an argument which contains no spaces, it will return a blank string.

Although regexes will be more computationally expensive, they provide a lot more flexibiltiy, e.g.:

function get_first_word($str)
{
 return (preg_match('/(\S)*/', $str, $matches) ? $matches[0] : $str);
}

Answer 6

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 7

There is an unmentioned function call that I consistently use for this exact task.

strstr() with a third parameter of true, will return the substring before the first occurrence of the needle string.

Code: (Demo)

$array = [
    'x' => 'Laura Smith',
    'y' => 'John. Smith',
    'z' => 'John Doe'
];

foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
    $array[$key] = strstr($value, ' ', true);
}

var_export($array);

Output:

array (
  'x' => 'Laura',
  'y' => 'John.',
  'z' => 'John',
)

Note, if the needle is not found in the string, strstr() will return false.

p.s.

• Because there are single-function techniques to perform this task, there is no compelling reason to use multiple-function techniques to do the same work.
• Because the needle is a static string (a space) there is absolutely no reason to introduce the overhead of a regex call.
• If anyone is considering the use of explode() to produce a temporary array instead of a more direct "string in - string out" operation such as strtok() or strstr(), be sure to declare the third parameter of explode() using the integer that represents your targeted element's index + 1 -- this way the function will stop making new elements as soon as it has isolated the substring that you seek.

Answer 8

You can do also like this

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