PHP function substr() error

Question

When I use substr() I get a strange character at the end

$articleText = substr($articleText,0,500);

I have an output of 500 c

Answer 1

ms_substr() also works excellently for removing strange trailing line breaks as well, which I was having trouble with after parsing html code. The problem was NOT handled by:

 trim() 

or:

 var_dump(preg_match('/^\n|\n$/', $variable));

or:

str_replace (array('\r\n', '\n', '\r'), ' ', $text)

Don't catch.