Question

I need to select a portion of a string. I know the start and end point of the string (found using strpos) but I don’t know how to select this portion of the string….substr won’t work as the string can be different lengths. I need to be able to truncate the string by saying start at this character and end at this character.

I’m sure there’s a way to do this but can’t seem to finds it in the manual

Answer 1

As already mentioned substr is perfectly fine.

I am writing this answer just to provide you with example (as it seems you are a bit confused)

$string = 'This string is too long and I want only a portion of it where I know the start and end position of the portion';

// now if you want to get everything between "too long" and "position" and you know the position for start and end which in this case are:
$start = 15; // 16th character
$end = 95; // 96th character

// from inside out first substr cuts the end of the string at requred character, the other substr cuts the beginning of the string
// resulting in portion beginning at 16th character and ending at 96th character.
$portion = substr(substr($string, 0, -(strlen($string) - $end)), $start);

var_dump($portion);

Hope that helps you out 🙂