Cut off one last character

[Anon]

I have one combo box where users choose from a list ( coming out of MySQL ).
Upon selection the value of this select box is something like 22779 or 2388a
I'm looking to use PHP in such way that upon submission this value of 22779
will be cut off of the last character e.g. 2277 or 2388
How can I resolve this with PHP ?

[Anon]

Althought I am sure there is a better way of doing this, I wrote a little function I call left() which allows me to get x# of characters from a string starting at the left

ie.."22779" and I want 4 characters of it you say left("22779",4) and it returns "2277", or you can call strlen() -1 to get the length minus 1

<pre>
function left($string,$arg) {
$string = (string) $string;
for ($arg = --$arg; $i <= $arg; $i++) {
$s .= $string[$i];
}
return $s;
}
</pre>

example

<pre>
$a = "27798";
$a = left($a,strlen($a) - 1);
echo("$a");
</pre>

[tasistro]

$yourstring=substr($original_string,0,4);
will return the first 4 characters

$yourstring=substr($original_string,0,(strlen($original_string)-1);
will return all characters starting from 0 and falling short of the last one.

if all your strings are 5 characters long the first option is better otherwise use the second one.

Saludos
Gerardo