How to get the first character of string in php

Question

I need to get the first character of the given string. here i have a name in the session variable. i am passing the variable value to the substr to get the first character of the string. but i couldn't.

i want to get the first character of that string.

for example John doe. i want to get the first character of the string j. how can i get it using php?

  <?php
      $username = $_SESSION['my_name'];
      $fstchar = substr($username, -1);
  ?>

Answer 1

substr($username, 0, 1);

This will get you the first character

Another way is to do this:

$username[0];

Answer 2

Three solutions sorted by robustness

• 1. mb_substr: It takes into considetation the text encoding.
     Example: mb_substr($str, 0, 1)
• 2. substr
     Example: substr($str, 0, 1)
• 3. Using brackets: to avoid as it throws a notice in PHP 7.x and a warning in PHP 8.x if the string is empty
     Example: $str[0]