2

I'm having trouble knowing how many times that the - character is in front of my string.

Some examples:

$string = "-Lorem Ipsum";   // 1
$string = "--Lorem Ipsum";  // 2
$string = "---Lorem Ipsum"; // 3
$string = "--Lorem-Ipsum";  // 2

But how can I find this? I know you can search the number of occurrences of a character in a string. But I want the number of - characters before an alphabet letter. Not all the sequences (see last example).

How should I approach this?

nielsv
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3 Answers3

3

You can use the old school trick of using a string as an array here as such:

$search="-";
$i=0;
while($string[$i]==$search)
{
    $i++;
}
echo "Found $i instances at the start of the string.";
Fluffeh
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1

What about using ltrim() and strlen()

echo strlen($string) - strlen(ltrim($string, "-"));

See example at eval.in

Jonny 5
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0

it would also work - 

preg_match('/(?!-)/', $string, $match, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);

$match - the position of any character but - which is indeed the count of -.

Sougata Bose
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