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, ' '));