How to get the first word of a sentence in PHP

Question

I want to extract the first word of a variable from a string  For example  take this input    lt  php  myvalue    Test me more     gt    The resultant output should be Test  which is the first word of the input  How can I do this

User · Answer

If you have PHP 5 3   myvalue    Test me more   echo strstr  myvalue       true     note that if  myvalue is a string with one word strstr doesn t return anything in this case  A solution could be to append a space to the test-string   echo strstr   myvalue             true      That will always return the first word of the string  even if the string has just one word in it  The alternative is something like    i   strpos  myvalue        echo  i     false    myvalue   substr   myvalue  0   i      Or using explode  which has so many answers using it I won t bother pointing out how to do it

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Function that will tokenize string into two parts  first word and remaining string   Return Value  It will have first and remaining key in  return array respectively  first check strpos   title          false is mandatory in case when string has only one word and no space in it   function getStringFirstWord   title          return            if  strpos   title          false               firstWord   strstr  title     true            remainingTitle   substr strstr  title       1            if   empty   firstWord                    return  first      firstWord                    if   empty   remainingTitle                    return  remaining      remainingTitle                      else            return  first      title             return  return

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Just in case you are not sure the string starts with a word      input     Test me more    echo preg replace     s      s             2    input     Test

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If you want to know how fast each of these respective functions is  I ran some crude benchmarking in PHP 7 3 on the six most voted answers here  strpos with substr  explode with current  strstr  explode with trim  str word count and strtok  with 1 000 000 iterations each to compare their speeds    lt  php   strTest    This is a string to test fetching first word of a string methods      before   microtime true   for   i 0    i lt 1000000    i           p   strpos  strTest             p     false    strTest   substr   strTest  0   p       after   microtime true   echo  strpos  substr      after- before   i     seconds lt br gt      before   microtime true   for   i 0    i lt 1000000    i          strstr  strTest       true      after   microtime true   echo  strstr      after- before   i     seconds lt br gt      before   microtime true   for   i 0    i lt 1000000    i          current explode      strTest       after   microtime true   echo  explode  current      after- before   i     seconds lt br gt      before   microtime true   for   i 0    i lt 1000000    i           arr   explode     trim  strTest         arr 0      after   microtime true   echo  explode  trim      after- before   i     seconds lt br gt      before   microtime true   for   i 0    i lt 1000000    i          str word count  strTest  1      after   microtime true   echo  str word count      after- before   i     seconds lt br gt      before   microtime true   for   i 0    i lt 1000000    i          strtok  value           after   microtime true   echo  strtok      after- before   i     seconds lt br gt       gt    Here are the varying results from 2 consecutive runs   strpos  substr  6 0736894607544E-8 seconds strstr  5 0434112548828E-8 seconds explode  current  3 5163116455078E-7 seconds explode  trim  3 8683795928955E-7 seconds str word count  4 6665270328522E-6 seconds strtok  4 9849510192871E-7 seconds  strpos  substr  5 7171106338501E-8 seconds strstr  4 7624826431274E-8 seconds explode  current  3 3753299713135E-7 seconds explode  trim  4 2293286323547E-7 seconds str word count  3 7025549411774E-6 seconds strtok  1 2249300479889E-6 seconds   And the results after inverting the order of the functions   strtok  4 2612719535828E-7 seconds str word count  4 1899878978729E-6 seconds explode  trim  9 3175292015076E-7 seconds explode  current  7 0811605453491E-7 seconds strstr  1 0137891769409E-7 seconds strpos  substr  1 0082197189331E-7 seconds   Conclusion It turns out that the speed between these functions varies widely and is not as consistent between test runs as you might expect  According to these quick and dirty tests  any of the six chosen functions will get the job done in a reasonable amount of time  There are perturbations including other processes running that are interfering with the execution times  So just use whatever function makes the most practical and readable sense to you as a programmer  For the bigger programming picture  see Donald Knuth s Literate Programming

User · Answer

first word   str word count 1  0   Doesn t work on special characters  and will result in wrong behaviour if special characters are used  It is not UTF-8 friendly   For more info check is PHP str word count   multibyte safe

User · Answer

strtok is quicker than extract or preg   functions

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string     Test me more    preg match    b w  b i    string   result      Test echo  result      You could use  a-zA-Z   instead of  w  if wanted only alphabetical chars      string     Test me more    preg match    b a-zA-Z   b i    string   result      Test echo  result    Regards  Ciul

User · Answer

You question could be reformulated as  replace in the string the first space and everything following by nothing    So this can be achieved with a simple regular expression    firstWord   preg replace    s          ltrim  myvalue      I have added an optional call to ltrim   to be safe  this function remove spaces at the begin of string

User · Answer

You could do  echo current explode      myvalue

User · Answer

lt  php    value    Hello world      tokens   explode       value     echo  tokens 0     gt    Just use explode to get every word of the input and output the first element of the resulting array

User · Answer

Using split function also you can get the first word from string    lt  php  myvalue   Test me more    result split      myvalue   echo  result 0     gt

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You Can do it using PHP string function substr without conveting string into array     string    some text here     stringLength  strlen  string    echo ucfirst substr  string - stringLength-1  1        output S

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You can use the explode function as follows    myvalue    Test me more    arr   explode     trim  myvalue    echo  arr 0      will print Test

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input    Test me more   echo preg replace    s          input       Test

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There is a string function  strtok  which can be used to split a string into smaller strings  tokens  based on some separator s    For the purposes of this thread  the first word  defined as anything before the first space character  of Test me more can be obtained by tokenizing the string on the space character    lt  php  value    Test me more   echo strtok  value           Test   gt    For more details and examples  see the strtok PHP manual page

User · Answer

personally strsplit   explode   strtok does not support word boundaries  so to get a more accute split use regular expression with the  w  preg split     s      string 1     This would split words with boundaries to a limit of 1

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Similar to accepted answer with one less step    my value    Test me more    first word   explode     trim  my value   0       first word     Test

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Even though it is little late  but PHP has one better solution for this    words str word count  myvalue  1   echo  words 0

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str   lt  php  myvalue   Test me more    gt     s   preg split                     str -1 PREG SPLIT DELIM CAPTURE   print  s 1

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Since you can not check with strok for upper or lowercase this works perfectly for checking the first word   if  strtolower strtok  text           strtolower  firstword

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public function getStringFirstAlphabet  string        data          string explode       string        i 0      foreach   string as  key   gt   value             data   value  i             return  data

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All of the answers here are using an approach that the processor needs to search all of the string even if the first word is found  For big strings  this is not recommended  This approach is optimal   function getFirstWord  string         result           foreach  string as  char            if  char         amp  amp  strlen  result                 break                     result     char            return  result

[php] How to get the first word of a sentence in PHP?

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