Question

I have many fields that are like this pattern:

    re2man: (johnny bravo)
re1man: (john smith)......

user: (firstname lastname)..

I wanted to use regex, or another php function to get only characters before the colon (“:”)

Answer 1

Look at explode() to simply split the string at the ‘:’.

For instance, list($username) = explode(':', $string);

(list() is being used to assign just the first part of the exploded string to $username and discard the rest; a longer way to do it would be:

$parts = explode(':', $string);
$username = $parts[0];

Also, you could use the extra limit parameter to indicate that you don’t need the rest of the parts, like:

list($username) = explode(':', $string, 1);

That may or may not be faster. Also, I would expect using explode() to be more efficient than some of the other regex-based solutions offered.