How do I get the first character in a string?

[tguill]

This has to be a very basic technique, but I'm not finding it in my books or on the web.

I have this :

$firstName = 'John'
$lastName = 'Doe'

I want to get 'J. Doe'

How do I pull the 'J'?

Thanks

Tim

[TheDefender]

[man]substr[/man]

$firstName = "John"; 
$lastName = "Doe";

//usage
$fname = substr($firstName, 0, 1);
$name = $fname.". ".$lastName;
echo $name;

[cahva]

Isnt this much better?

$fullname = $firstname{0}.'. '.$lastName;

[TheDefender]

Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about the various values of the string itself being in an array like that.... That is much easier. I use the substr so often in search engines I build that I wasn't even thinking about individual strings like this. LOL 😃