How to remove everything before the first specific character in a string?

Question

My variables look like this:

AAAAAAA, BB CCCCCCCC

AAAA,BBBBBB CCCCCC

I would like to remove everything before the ",",

so the results should look like:

BB CCCCCCCC

BBBBBB CCCCCC

I have worked out this to remove everything AFTER the ",":

list($xxx) = explode(',', $yyyyy);

unfortunately I dont know how to get it to work to remove everything BEFORE the ",".

Answer 1

Since this is a simple string manipulation, you can use the following to remove all characters before the first comma:

$string = preg_replace('/^[^,]*,\s*/', '', $input);

preg_replace() allows you to replace parts of a string based on a regular expression. Let's take a look at the regular expression.

• / is the start delimiter
  • ^ is the "start of string" anchor
  • [^,] every character that isn't a comma (^ negates the class here)
    • * repeated zero or more times
  • , regular comma
  • \s any whitespace character
    • * repeated zero or more times
• / end delimiter

Answer 2

I wouldn't recommend using explode, as it causes more issues if there is more than one comma.

// removes everything before the first ,
$new_str = substr($str, ($pos = strpos($str, ',')) !== false ? $pos + 1 : 0);

Edit:

if(($pos = strpos($str, ',')) !== false)
{
   $new_str = substr($str, $pos + 1);
}
else
{
   $new_str = get_last_word($str);
}