Detect a character in URL

Is there a way of detecting a value of the first character in a string?..

Here's what I mean.

Let's say I pass some value attacheched to URL, can i detect what is the first character in that value?

i.e. mypage.pgp?value1=somevalue

Is it possible to get the

s from mypage.pgp?value1=somevalue

I know I could use if (ereg("value1=s",$REQUEST_URI)) but what if this value1 changes?, which it is?

Any ideas?

Since I perfer Perl compatible regex, that's what I'm using:

<?PHP
$url = "mypage.php?value1=somevalue";
preg_match("/\\?(?:.*?)=(.)/", $url, $matches);
echo $matches[1];
?>

use substr()

$char = subst($value1,0,1);

I believe if you treat the string as an array, it will also work.

also look up strpos() and strstr()

$char = $value1[0];

[ ] is supported but not recommended as it's to be used for arrays only afair

but

echo $string{0};

does a good job