How to get the first word of a string/sentence in PHP?

There is a string function (strtok) which can be used to split a string into smaller strings (tokens) based on some separator(s). For the purposes of this thread, the first word (defined as anything before the first space character) of Test me more can be obtained by tokenizing the string on the space character.

<?php
$value = "Test me more";
echo strtok($value, " "); // Test
?>

For more details and examples, see the strtok PHP manual page.

Alternative solutions

$myvalue = 'Test me more';
echo strstr($myvalue, ' ', true); // will print Test

echo current(explode(' ',$myvalue)); // will print Test

$myvalue = 'Test me more';
$arr = explode(' ',trim($myvalue));
echo $arr[0]; // will print Test

$string = ' Test me more ';
preg_match('/\b\w+\b/i', $string, $result); 
echo $result; // will print Test


/* You could use [a-zA-Z]+ instead of \w+ if wanted only alphabetical chars. */
$string = ' Test me more ';
preg_match('/\b[a-zA-Z]+\b/i', $string, $result); 
echo $result; // will print Test

Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2476789/how-to-get-the-first-word-of-a-sentence-in-php