Question

I want to remove the first character of a string like so,

$a1 = "A10";
$a2 = substr($a1,1,strlen($startsem1)-1);

but I want to retrieve that removed “A” later on. Is there a way I can “cut” or “copy” that removed “A” to some variable?

Answer 1

Did you mean:

$a1 = "A10";
$a2 = substr($a1,1,strlen($a1)-1);
echo $a1[0]; // output "A" eg old value for you
echo $a2; // output "10"

PHP supports array like syntax for strings too so $a1[0] (zero based index as in array) extracts first letter from string.