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

Use the strstr function.

Example:

$my_string = "This is my best string - You like it?";
$my_new_string = strstr($my_string, '-', true);

echo($my_new_string);

Answer 2

I hope these patterns will help you =]

$pattern1='/.+(?=\s-)/'       //This will match the string before the " -";
$pattern2='/(?<=\s-\s).+/'    //This will match the string after the "- ";

Answer 3

You can also use.

strstr( "John Chio - Guy", "-", true ) . '-';

The third parameter true tells the function to return everything before first occurrence of the second parameter.

Source on strstr() from php.net

Answer 4

Explode or regexp are an overkill, try this:

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

or the strtok version in one of the answers here.

Answer 5

To remove everything after the first hyphen you can use this regular expression in your code:

"/-.*$/"

To remove everything after the last hyphen you can use this regular expression:

"/-[^-]*$/"

http://ideone.com/gbLA9

You can also combine this with trimming whitespace from the end of the result:

"/\s*-[^-]*$/"

Answer 6

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 ;)