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Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning of a string
String Functions
PHP Manual

ltrim

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

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

Description

string ltrim ( string $str [, string $character_mask ] )

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

Parameters

str

The input string.

character_mask

You can also specify the characters you want to strip, by means of the character_mask parameter. Simply list all characters that you want to be stripped. With .. you can specify a range of characters.

Return Values

This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning of str. Without the second parameter, ltrim() will strip these characters:

Changelog

Version Description
4.1.0 The character_mask parameter was added.

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


String Functions
PHP Manual