Question

This is sort of a rookie question, but…

I’m calling a function in another php file that uses preg_match to get a string. I then want to use substr to get a specific part of that string, however it doesn’t output any of the characters in the string. When I replace the variable from the preg_match function, I get the right output.

Here is the basic code:

$title = $stream["song1"]; // From a preg_match in an external php file
echo $title; // Correctly prints the song name, in this case "mySong"
echo substr($title, 0, 1);  // Outputs a "<" symbol (why??)

If I run the same three lines above, but hard code the song title:

$title = "mySong";
echo $title; // Correctly prints the song name, in this case "mySong"
echo substr($title, 0, 1);  // Outputs a "m" symbol (correct)

Also, when I check the type of variable $title is, it returns “string”. I’m sure I’m doing something really stupid… can anyone help?

Answer 1

It seems $title contains html tags, thus the first character will be the <.

Use htmlentities() to echo the full output and then you should be able to see which part of the string you’re actually looking for.

echo htmlentities($title);

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Alternatively, you can simply remove all html tags from the string using strip_tags():

$title = strip_tags($title);
echo substr($title, 0, 1); // should work