How to remove anything in a string after "-"?

Question

This is the example of my string.

$x = "John Chio - Guy"; $y = "Kelly Chua - Woman"; 

I need the pattern for the reg replace.

$pattern = ?? $x = preg_replace($pattern, '', $x);  

Thanks

Answer 1

No need for regex. You can use explode:

$str = array_shift(explode('-', $str)); 

or substr and strpos:

$str = substr($str, 0, strpos($str, '-')); 

Maybe in combination with trim to remove leading and trailing whitespaces.

Update: As @Mark points out this will fail if the part you want to get contains a -. It all depends on your possible input.

So assuming you want to remove everything after the last dash, you can use strrpos, which finds the last occurrence of a substring:

$str = substr($str, 0, strrpos($str, '-')); 

So you see, there is no regular expression needed ;)

Answer 2

To remove everything after the first hyphen you can use this regular expression in your code:

"/-.*$/" 

To remove everything after the last hyphen you can use this regular expression:

"/-[^-]*$/" 

http://ideone.com/gbLA9

You can also combine this with trimming whitespace from the end of the result:

"/\s*-[^-]*$/"