PHP Remove everything before a character

Question

So i have this in my test.txt file:

5436 : Ball Of Yarn
1849 : Blue Border Collie Headband
24063 : Blue Border Collie Hoodie

I'm trying to remove everything before the ":", this is my PHP code:

$str = file_get_contents("test.txt");
$string2 = substr($str, ($pos = strpos($str, ' : ')) !== false ? $pos + 1 : 0);
file_put_contents("test.txt", $string2);

Help me please

Answer 1

you can do something like this:

$arr = file("test.txt");
foreach ($arr as $line) {
   echo substr($line, ($pos = strpos($line, ' : ')) !== false ? $pos + 1 : 0);
}

Answer 2

If you are not afraid to use regex you can use this: (works if your characters before : are numbers only). If you need other chars let me know.

$str = file_get_contents("test.txt");
$string2 = preg_replace('/[0-9 ]+:/', "", $str);
file_put_contents("test.txt", $string2);

This does what you wanted exactly and keeps your structure; just second line is changed :)

See more about regex here or in this basic tutorial which looks nice to start with.

Answer 3

You could try to use fgetcsv . Here is an example of use :

$ cat test.txt
5436 : Ball Of Yarn
1849 : Blue Border Collie Headband
24063 : Blue Border Collie Hoodie
$ cat test.php
#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
    $in_file="test.txt";
    if (false !== ($handle = fopen($in_file, "r"))){
        while(false !== ($line = fgetcsv($handle, 0, ":"))){
            if(isset($line[1]) && $line[1]){
                echo "LINE=" . trim($line[1]) . "\n";
            }
        }
    }
?>
$ ./test.php
LINE=Ball Of Yarn
LINE=Blue Border Collie Headband
LINE=Blue Border Collie Hoodie

Another solution using preg_replace :

$ cat test.php
#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
    $in_file="test.txt";
    if (false !== ($handle = fopen($in_file, "r"))){
        while(false !== ($line = fgets($handle))){
            echo "LINE=" . trim(preg_replace("/^[^:]*:\ ?([^:]*)$/", "$1", $line)) . "\n";
        }
    }
?>
$ ./test.php
LINE=Ball Of Yarn
LINE=Blue Border Collie Headband
LINE=Blue Border Collie Hoodie

Answer 4

Here's a solution using array_map to alter the contents of each line then write to the file, with perhaps a better way of stripping the line for you:

function editLine($line) {
    return strstr($line, ':') ?: $line;
}

$lines = file('test.txt');
$editedLines = array_map('editLine', $lines);
file_put_contents('test.txt', implode('', $editedLines));