How to remove anything in a string after “-”?

Question

This is the example of my string.

$x = \"John Chio - Guy\";
$y = \"Kelly Chua - Woman\";

I need the pattern for the reg replace.

Answer 1

No need for regex. You can use explode:

$str = array_shift(explode('-', $str));

or substr and strpos:

$str = substr($str, 0, strpos($str, '-'));

Maybe in combination with trim to remove leading and trailing whitespaces.

Update: As @Mark points out this will fail if the part you want to get contains a -. It all depends on your possible input.

So assuming you want to remove everything after the last dash, you can use strrpos, which finds the last occurrence of a substring:

$str = substr($str, 0, strrpos($str, '-'));

So you see, there is no regular expression needed ;)