how to remove first word from a php string

Question

I'd like to remove the first word from a string using PHP. Tried searching but couldn't find an answer that I could make sense of.

eg: "White Tank Top" so it becomes "Tank Top"

Thanks

Do you mean the characters before the first space? – PeeHaa Jul 25 '11 at 22:28 — PeeHaa, Jul 25 '11 at 22:28

amosrivera · Answer 1 · 2011-07-25T22:44:20.483

66

No need for explode or array manipulation, you can use function strstr:

echo strstr("White Tank Top"," ");
//Tank Top

UPDATE: Thanks to @Sid To remove the extra white space you can do:

echo substr(strstr("White Tank Top"," "), 1);

edited Jul 25 '11 at 22:44

answered Jul 25 '11 at 22:32

amosrivera

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This is better than the array manipulation answers, however this will leave the space character too. This can be cut out by doing echo substr(strstr("White Tank Top"," "), 1); – Sid Jul 25 '11 at 22:37
1

+1 for simplicity, I keep forgetting about `strtr`. Was about to type out 3 lines using `strpos` + `substr` when I saw your answer. Add an `ltrim` in case there are multiple spaces and you're golden. – Fanis Hatzidakis Jul 25 '11 at 22:38
@Sid white space at the beginning you mean? i just gave it a check and it worked fine for me can you verify? – amosrivera Jul 25 '11 at 22:39
@Fanis i totally get you, with so many different functions for string manipulation in php is easy to forget. – amosrivera Jul 25 '11 at 22:40
@amosrivera like @Sid said it will include the space it's matching on. You won't see it easily by echoing out on a web page but do a `strlen` or run it in a debugger and you'll spot it :) – Fanis Hatzidakis Jul 25 '11 at 22:42
1

@Sid @Fanis `strlen` showed the white space interesting, added your solution to the answer thanks! – amosrivera Jul 25 '11 at 22:45

Alex · Answer 2 · 2016-05-27T09:15:35.143

8

You can use the preg_replace function with the regex ^(\w+\s) that will match the first word of a string per se:

$str = "White Tank Top";
$str = preg_replace("/^(\w+\s)/", "", $str);
var_dump($str); // -> string(8) "Tank Top"

edited May 27 '16 at 09:15

answered May 27 '16 at 08:38

Alex

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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 25 '11 at 22:30

3

function remove_word($sentence)
{
 $words=array_shift(explode(' ', $sentence));
 return implode(' ', $words);
}

?

answered Jul 25 '11 at 22:30

symcbean

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could you also condense that down into `return implode(' ', array_shift(explode(' ', $sentence)));`? i was never quite sure with php. – Patrick Perini Jul 25 '11 at 22:32
This solution is a memory hog. If the string has lots of spaces the arrays will become large. amosrivera's solution is much better (though not quite complete as it leaves the space character too). – Sid Jul 25 '11 at 22:36
@Patrick Perini: no - array_shift() returns the first element in the array - not the modified array – symcbean Jul 26 '11 at 08:29
@Sid: first, amosrivera's answer is semantically different (consider what happens with a string containing no spaces) also I would hardly call this a memory hog - I would expect it to use more memory than amosrivera's answer - but without testing each method I can't tell which has a bigger effective footprint on the system. – symcbean Jul 26 '11 at 08:33
Hog or not, this answer is missing an explanation. The point is, your snippet performs too many explosions. Please see my limited explosion. – mickmackusa Nov 21 '19 at 10:07

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 11 '15 at 10:05

function remove_word($sentence)
{
    $exp = explode(' ', $sentence);
    $removed_words = array_shift($exp);
    if(count($exp)>1){
        $w = implode(' ', $exp);
    }else{
        $w = $exp[0];
    }
    return $w;
}

Try this function i hope it's work for you .

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 25 '11 at 22:31

$string = 'White Tank Top';

$split = explode(' ', $string);
if (count($split) === 1) {
    // do you still want to drop the first word even if string only contains 1 word?
    // also string might be empty
} else {
    // remove first word
    unset($split[0]);
    print(implode(' ', $split));
}

mickmackusa · Answer 6 · 2019-11-25T07:48:08.473

If you are not guaranteed to have a space in your string, be careful to choose a technique that won't fail on such cases.

If using explode() be sure to limit the explosions for best efficiency.

Demonstration:

$strings = ["White", "White Tank", "White Tank Top"];
foreach ($strings as $string) {
    echo "\n{$string}:";
    echo "\n-\t" , substr($string, 1 + (strpos($string, ' ') ?: -1));

    $explodeOnce = explode(' ', $string, 2);
    echo "\n-\t" , end($explodeOnce);              

    echo "\n-\t" , substr(strstr($string, " "), 1);

    echo "\n-\t" , ltrim(strstr($string, " "));

    echo "\n-\t" , preg_replace('~^\S+\s~', '', $string);
}

Output:

White:
-   White
-   White
-                       // strstr() returned false
-                       // strstr() returned false  
-   White
White Tank:
-   Tank
-   Tank
-   Tank
-   Tank
-   Tank
White Tank Top:
-   Tank Top
-   Tank Top
-   Tank Top
-   Tank Top
-   Tank Top

My preference is the regex technique because it is stable in all cases above and is a single function call. Note that there is no need for a capture group because the fullstring match is being replaced. ^ matches the start of the string, \S+ matches one or more non-whitespace characters and \s matches one whitespace character.

how to remove first word from a php string

6 Answers6