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ltrim

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

ltrim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning of a string

Description

ltrim(string $string, string $characters = " \n\r\t\v\x00"): string

Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning of a string.

Without the second parameter, mb_ltrim() will strip these characters:

Parameters

string
The input string.
characters
Optionally, the stripped characters can also be specified using the characters parameter. Simply list all characters that need to be stripped. With .. it is possible to specify an incrementing range of characters.

Return Values

This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning of string.

Examples

Example #1 Usage example of ltrim()

<?php

$text = "\t\tThese are a few words :) ... ";
$binary = "\x09Example string\x0A";
$hello = "Hello World";
var_dump($text, $binary, $hello);

print "\n";


$trimmed = ltrim($text);
var_dump($trimmed);

$trimmed = ltrim($text, " \t.");
var_dump($trimmed);

$trimmed = ltrim($hello, "Hdle");
var_dump($trimmed);

// trim the ASCII control characters at the beginning of $binary
// (from 0 to 31 inclusive)
$clean = ltrim($binary, "\x00..\x1F");
var_dump($clean);

?>

The above example will output:

string(32) "        These are a few words :) ...  "
string(16) "    Example string
"
string(11) "Hello World"

string(30) "These are a few words :) ...  "
string(30) "These are a few words :) ...  "
string(7) "o World"
string(15) "Example string
"

See Also