First three characters from a string

[treeleaf20]

If I have a string like evo12345 or trs57898 or 123456789 how do I select the first three letters or numbers from the string so I would want to select evo from teh first one, trs from the second one and 123 from the third one. The strings each time are completely different. Thank you .

Ryan

[drew010]

to select the first three characters from any string, you can use $three = substr($str, 0, 3);
to grab the first three numbers that appear in a string, possibly preceded by letters, you could use
preg_match('/^{.*?(\d{3})/i',} $str, $matches);
$matches[1]; will contain the first 3 numbers