ltrim() trims too much

pipe_girl

Hi all,

When I use ltrim on a string to remove starting paragraph tags it works great, however if I have more than one tag at the beginning of the string it will also remove part of it as well. For example:

$string = "text text";
print ltrim($string, "");

Would output:

b>text text

I would like to remove only whole tags from the start of a string and nothing more. Is there something simple I am overlooking here, or can someone suggest a different function?

Thanks, Pipe

dalecosp

You might look at [man]str_replace[/man], [man]ereg_replace[/man], [man]preg_replace[/man], and friends. Or, you might hack something together with [man]strlen[/man], or [man]strpos[/man] --- there are a lot of ways to chop up strings.

That said, the behavior of ltrim is probably expected...you told it to strip any < in the second argument.... 😉

(And, no, I don't know any good way around it off the top of my head ... but given time, either you or I could probably come up with a half-dozen or so.....)

Aurasia

Pipe Girl,
I think it's because the sequence of characters you put after your 'to-be-trimmed' string isn't a sequence ... it's a series, so:

$string = "<p><b>text text"; 
print ltrim($string, "<p>");

isn't telling it to trim out "" ... it's telling it to trim out '<' characters, 'p' characters, and '>' characters ... so when it comes across your 'b' it stops.

It'd suggests using some variation of str_replace() and replacing your with "".

// Provides: Hll Wrld f PHP
$vowels = array("a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "A", "E", "I", "O", "U");
$onlyconsonants = str_replace($vowels, "", "Hello World of PHP");

Trouble there is ... I don't know how to limit it to looking at only the first characters. Sorry, but I don't really know much about this stuff. Hope that helps a lil'.

Your other option would be to use an ereg_replace() function ...
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.ereg.php