regex is nicer, because it is less code and you can detect any white space etc. However! substring etc will be faster and more understandable to others who do not know much about regexes. On Sat, 29 Oct 2016 at 02:21 Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@xxxxxx> wrote: > On 28.10.2016 at 14:51, Richard wrote: > > >> Date: Friday, October 28, 2016 12:09:31 +0100 > >> From: Ashley Sheridan <ash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > >> > >> On 28 October 2016 12:01:16 BST, Narcis Garcia > >> <informatica@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > >>> Hello, I have a string (I quote here only) as: > >>> > >>> ' <table>...</table>' > >>> > >>> As you can see there are 3 spaces at the beginning, but it could > >>> be 0 or > >>> 4 or any number of spaces. > >>> How can I get a string with only the initial spaces part? > >>> > >>> ' <table>...</table>' -> ' ' > >>> 'hello' -> '' > >>> ' hello' -> ' ' > >>> > >>> Thanks. > >> > >> Have you tried regular expressions? Something like: > >> > >> ^( )*[^ ] > >> > >> The first captured match is the number of spaces, from 0 to any > >> amount. Not the space between the brackets and before the closing > >> square bracket > > > > You need to take into consideration that "whitespace" can be created > > by more than the simple "space" (ascii 32) character. A "[horizontal] > > tab" (ascii 9) is common, but also look at the top of php trim > > function documentation: > > > > <http://php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php> > > > > to see the characters that it handles as "whitespace". > > If general whitespace should be detected with a regexp, \s could be used. > > > While "trim" > > does the opposite of what you're after, […] > > Indeed, so one could do something like > > substr($string, 0, strlen($string) - strlen(ltrim($string))) > > I'd prefer a regexp solution, though. > > -- > Christoph M. Becker > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
