Remove characters after string?

Question

I have strings that looks like this:

John Miller-Doe - Name: jdoe
Jane Smith - Name: jsmith
Peter Piper - Name: ppiper
Bob Mackey-O'Donnell - Name: bmackeyodonnell

I'm trying to remove everything after the second hyphen, so that I'm left with:

John Miller-Doe
Jane Smith
Peter Piper
Bob Mackey-O'Donnell

So, basically, I'm trying to find a way to chop it off right before "- Name:". I've been playing around with substr and preg_replace, but I can't seem to get the results I'm hoping for... Can someone help?

Answer 1

Assuming that the strings will always have this format, one possibility is:

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

Reference: substr, strpos

Answer 2

Use preg_replace() with the pattern / - Name:.*/:

<?php
$text = "John Miller-Doe - Name: jdoe
Jane Smith - Name: jsmith
Peter Piper - Name: ppiper
Bob Mackey-O'Donnell - Name: bmackeyodonnell";

$result = preg_replace("/ - Name:.*/", "", $text);
echo "result: {$result}\n";
?>

Output:

result: John Miller-Doe 
Jane Smith 
Peter Piper 
Bob Mackey-O'Donnell