Get one letter on two from a string

Question

I have a string like :

12121212

I want to get only 1111, the first letter, then the third, then the fifth ... one letter on two.

Is there any function for this ? I am using str_split then I take the first letter of my array, but it's not very clean. Thanks.

This is my code for now, but it's not very flexible :

function loop_n_letter($string, $n)
{
    $return = '';
    $array = str_split($string);

    foreach ($array as $i => $row)
    {
       if ($i % $n == 0)
       {
           $return .= $row[0];
       }
    }

    return $return;
}

Answer 1

Recall that you can get a character of a string by simply calling the specific index of the string. Try using a for loop like so:

$string = '12121212';
$length = strlen($string);
$result = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i = $i + 2) {
    $result .= $string[$i];
}
die($result);

You can change the index and the increment to get different parts of the string

Answer 2

Here's one with regular expressions:

$str = '12121212';
echo preg_replace('<(.)(.)>', '$1', $str);