Simple trick to extract substrings from a string

Sometimes we need to extract a substring from a long string. PHP provides a powerful function called substr() that allows you to extract a substring from a long string.

It takes three parameters: the string to be worked on, a starting index and an optional length. The starting index can be specified as either a positive integer that means the index of a character in the string starting from the beginning or a negative integer means the index of a character starting from the end.

Here goes few simples of substr() function:

$my_string = "1234567";
echo substr ($my_string, 0, 3); // outputs 123
echo substr ($my_string, 1, 1); // outputs 2
echo substr ($my_string, -2); // outputs 67
echo substr ($my_string, 1); // outputs 234567
echo substr ($my_string, -2, 1); // outputs 6

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