How to get the first word of a sentence in PHP?

Question

There is a string function (strtok) which can be used to split a string into smaller strings (tokens) based on some separator(s). For the purposes of this thread, the first word (defined as anything before the first space character) of Test me more can be obtained by tokenizing the string on the space character.

<?php
$value = "Test me more";
echo strtok($value, " "); // Test
?>

For more details and examples, see the strtok PHP manual page.

You can use the explode function as follows:

$myvalue = 'Test me more';
$arr = explode(' ',trim($myvalue));
echo $arr[0]; // will print Test

Another example:

$sentence = 'Hello World this is PHP';
$abbreviation = explode(' ', trim($sentence ))[0];
echo $abbreviation // will print Hello

If you have PHP 5.3

$myvalue = 'Test me more';
echo strstr($myvalue, ' ', true);

note that if $myvalue is a string with one word strstr doesn't return anything in this case. A solution could be to append a space to the test-string:

echo strstr( $myvalue . ' ', ' ', true );

That will always return the first word of the string, even if the string has just one word in it

The alternative is something like:

$i = strpos($myvalue, ' ');
echo $i !== false ? $myvalue : substr( $myvalue, 0, $i );

Or using explode, which has so many answers using it I won't bother pointing out how to do it.

You could do

echo current(explode(' ',$myvalue));

Even though it is little late, but PHP has one better solution for this:

$words=str_word_count($myvalue, 1);
echo $words[0];