Remove Characters at the Start and End of a String in PHP

In a previous article about how you can remove whitesapce from a string, I spoke about using the functions ltrim() and rtrim(). These work by passing in a string to remove whitespace. Using the ltrim() function will remove the whitespace from the start of the string, using the rtrim() function will remove the whitespace from the end of the string.

But you can also use these functions to remove characters from a string. These functions take a second parameter that allows you to specify what characters to remove.

// This will search for the word start at the beginning of the string and remove it
ltrim($string, 'start');  

// This will search for the word end at the end of the string and remove it
rtrim($string, 'end');

Remove Trailing Slashes From a String

A common use for this functionality is to remove the trailing slash from a URL. Below is a code snippet that allows you to easily do this using the rtrim() function.

function remove_trailing_slashes( $url )
{
     return rtrim($url, '/');
}

A common use for the ltrim() function is to remove the "http://" from a URL. Use the function below to remove both "http" and "https" from a URL:

function remove_http( $url )
{
    $url = ltrim($url, 'http://');
    $url = ltrim($url, 'https://');

    return $url;
}