How to get first 5 characters from string

For single-byte strings (e.g. US-ASCII, ISO 8859 family, etc.) use substr and for multi-byte strings (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.) use mb_substr:

// singlebyte strings
$result = substr($myStr, 0, 5);
// multibyte strings
$result = mb_substr($myStr, 0, 5);

You can use the substr function like this:

echo substr($myStr, 0, 5);

The second argument to substr is from what position what you want to start and third arguments is for how many characters you want to return.

Use substr():

$result = substr($myStr, 0, 5);

An alternative way to get only one character.

$str = 'abcdefghij';
echo $str{5};

I would particularly not use this, but for the purpose of education. We can use that to answer the question:

$newString = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) {
    $newString .= $str{$i};
}
echo $newString;

For anyone using that. Bear in mind curly brace syntax for accessing array elements and string offsets is deprecated from PHP 7.4

More information: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_curly_braces_array_access

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