Showing only first 3 characters

[wompninja]

Hi I am building a web app that displays the weather based off of the zip code a user submits. I've got it working almost perfectly except that I've got one stupid thing I can't get to work. I need the day of the week that is pulled for the 5 day forecast to be truncated to only the first 3 characters, i.e THU, SUN, SAT. Here's the code that pulls in the day. The snipit that calls the day is $w->day_of_week thanks in advance for your help.

$zip = $_POST['yourzip'];
$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://weather.wdtinc.com/feeds/wfld/worldForecast2Xml.php?ZIP=$zip&UNITS=us&TIMEZONE=local");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$xmlstr = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$forecast = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);

#print_r($forecast);

$info = (isset($forecast->forecast_info) ? $forecast->forecast_info : array());
#print_r($info);

$days = (isset($forecast->daily_summary) ? $forecast->daily_summary : array());

foreach ($days as $n => $w) {
  $img = wx_decode($w->wx_code);
}

echo "\n<h2 align='center'>5 Day Forecast</h2>\n\n";


foreach (array(0,1,2,3,4) as $n) {
  $w = $days[$n];
  $img = wx_decode($w->wx_code);
  echo "<div class='days'>
		<div class='dayofweek' align='center'>$w->day_of_week</div>
		<div class='icon'><img src='http://www.iwitnessweather.com/wp-content/themes/whiteboard 2.0.1/images/$imgsmall' alt='$alt'></div>
		<div class='temp'><span class='high'>$w->high</span>/<span class='low'>$w->low</span></div>
			</div>";
} 

[bradgrafelman]

[man]substr/man

EDIT: Also, welcome to PHPBuilder!

[wompninja]

I tried that. I used

echo "<div class='days'>
        <div class='dayofweek' align='center'>substr($w->day_of_week, 0, 3) </div>
        <div class='icon'><img src='http://www.iwitnessweather.com/wp-content/themes/whiteboard 2.0.1/images/$imgsmall' alt='$alt'></div>
        <div class='temp'><span class='high'>$w->high</span>/<span class='low'>$w->low</span></div>
            </div>"; 

but it didn't work, most likely because my syntax sucks. Can you spell it out a little more for me? Thanks for the welcome!

[bradgrafelman]

You can't throw some PHP code in the middle of a string and expect PHP to find it and parse it. You're telling PHP to echo a string out to the browser, so that's exactly what it's doing.

Instead, you need to use concatenation (which is nothing more than glueing two strings together) to insert the value returned by substr() into the string at the correct location.

Example:

echo "The result of the function is: " . myFunction() . "!";

See the manual page [man]operators.string[/man] for more information.

[wompninja]

Got it,

foreach (array(0,1,2,3,4) as $n) {
  $w = $days[$n];
  $dow = substr("$w->day_of_week", 0, 3);
  $img = wx_decode($w->wx_code);
  echo "<div class='days'>
		<div class='dayofweek' align='center'>$dow</div>
		<div class='icon'><img src='http://www.iwitnessweather.com/wp-content/themes/whiteboard 2.0.1/images/$imgsmall' alt='$alt'></div>
		<div class='temp'><span class='high'>$w->high</span>/<span class='low'>$w->low</span></div>
			</div>";
} 

Thanks for your help.

[bradgrafelman]

Glad I could help; don't forget to mark this thread resolved (if it is) using the link on the Thread Tools menu above.

Also note that this:

substr("$w->day_of_week", 0, 3)

could/should be written as:

substr($w->day_of_week, 0, 3)

instead (since the value you want for that parameter is the value of $w->day_of_week rather than a string containing that value).