To get the N characters in PHP, you can use substr() or mb_substr() to get the first N characters in PHP. The specific steps are as follows: 1. Use substr($string, 0, N) to intercept the first N characters, which is suitable for ASCII characters and is simple and efficient; 2. When processing multi-byte characters (such as Chinese), mb_substr($string, 0, N, 'UTF-8'), and ensure that the mbstring extension is enabled; 3. If the string contains HTML or whitespace characters, you should first use strip_tags() to remove the tags and trim() to clean the spaces, and then intercept them to ensure the results are clean.
Sometimes you need to take out the first few characters from a string, such as doing summary, truncated display, etc. PHP implements this in fact, but you have to pay attention to some details.

Using substr()
is the most direct way
This is a built-in string function in PHP, and the syntax is: substr($string, $start, $length)
. If you want to take the first N characters, write 0 at the starting position and N at the length. For example:
$str = "Hello, world!"; echo substr($str, 0, 5); // Output Hello
The advantage of this method is that it is simple and efficient, and has good compatibility. However, it should be noted that if the N you pass exceeds the length of the string itself, it will not report an error, it will just return the entire string.

Multi-byte characters need to be considered mb_substr()
If you are dealing with Chinese or other non-ASCII characters, using ordinary substr()
may cause problems because it is intercepted by bytes. At this time, you should use the mb_substr()
function, remember to specify the encoding, usually UTF-8:
$str = "Hello, world!"; echo mb_substr($str, 0, 3, 'UTF-8'); // Hello output,
Don't forget to enable the mbstring extension in PHP configuration, otherwise this function will not be used.

Pay attention to HTML or whitespace characters
If you are taking content from a database or user input, it may contain HTML tags or extra spaces or newlines. Direct intercepting at this time may cause the label to not be closed or there are strange characters at the beginning and end.
You can use strip_tags()
to remove HTML and then intercept it; or use trim()
to clean up the blanks before and after:
- Clean up first:
$cleaned = trim(strip_tags($str));
- Then intercept:
substr($cleaned, 0, $n)
This will result in a cleaner result.
Basically that's it. Use substr()
to solve most situations. If you use substr() to apply mb_substr()
to multi-bytes, clean up the dirty content in advance. The uncomplexing but easy to ignore is the character type and content format, especially in web applications.
The above is the detailed content of PHP get the first N characters of a string. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

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