Question

I want to discard all remaining characters in a string as soon as one of several unwanted characters is encountered.

As soon as a blacklisted character is encountered, the string before that point should be returned.

For instance, if I have an array:

$chars = array("a", "b", "c"); 

How would I go through the following string…

log dog hat bat 

…and end up with:

log dog h 

Answer 1

The strcspn function is what you are looking for.

<?php  $mask = 'abc';  $string = 'log dog hat bat';  $result = substr($string,0,strcspn($string,$mask));  var_dump($result);  ?>