Question

Example: I have a $variable = "_foo", and I want to make absolutely sure that $variable does not start with an underscore "_". How can I do that in PHP? Is there some access to the char array behind the string?

Answer 1

You might check out the substr function in php and grab the first character that way:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php

if (substr('_abcdef', 0, 1) === '_') { ... }