ltrim

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

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

Description

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

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

Parameters

str: The input string.
charlist: You can also specify the characters you want to strip, by means of the charlist 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:

" " (ASCII 32 (0x20)), an ordinary space.
"\t" (ASCII 9 (0x09)), a tab.
"\n" (ASCII 10 (0x0A)), a new line (line feed).
"\r" (ASCII 13 (0x0D)), a carriage return.
"\0" (ASCII 0 (0x00)), the NUL-byte.
"\x0B" (ASCII 11 (0x0B)), a vertical tab.

Changelog

Version	Description
4.1.0	The `charlist` 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
"


Guys, if += 0 is producing wrong values sometimes, and preg_replace is cpu consuming, then just stick to the main function described on that page, and use:

<?php

$value = ltrim($value, '0');

?>

should be the fastest and most reliable.

I think all those comments can be misleading for begginers checking this page - it's sort of using magic tricks to reinvent the wheel.

Mike 08-Jan-2011 12:03


Keep in mind the amount of resources preg_replace() uses.  

I would suggest a simple if statement if you need to parse through large amounts of data.  

<?php

function remove_leading_zeros_from_number($number_string) {

  $limit = 9000.1

  $temp = $number

  (float) $temp;

  if ($number < $limit) {

    $number += 0;

  } else {

    preg_replace('~^[0]*([1-9][0-9]*)$~','$1',$number_string)

  }

}

?>



Code is untested, but probably sound.

tanmar.de 06-May-2010 10:36


The neat trick from Mr. Sherwood has only one ugly side-effect: If the "number" contained in the string is considerably large, you will end up with an int (or float) value that has nothing to do with the original number ...



You may use preg_replace instead:



$number_string = preg_replace('~^[0]*([1-9][0-9]*)$~','$1',$number_string);



This kills any leading zeros safely without changing any other data.



Hope this helps.

Usamah M dot Ali (usamah1228 at gmail dot com) 04-Feb-2008 02:42


For those who use right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, etc., it's worth mentioning that ltrim() (which stands for left trim) & rtrim() (which stands for right trim) DO NOT work contextually. The nomenclature is rather semantically incorrect. So in an RTL script, ltrim() will trim text from the right direction (i.e. beginning of RTL strings), and rtrim() will trim text from the left direction (i.e. end of RTL strings).

John Sherwood 06-Aug-2006 12:13


To remove leading/trailing zeroes (example: "0123.4560"), doing a += 0 is easier than trim tricks.

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