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

ltrim

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

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

Description

ltrim(string $string, string $characters = " \n\r\t\v\x00"): string

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

Parameters

string: The input string.
characters: You can also specify the characters you want to strip, by means of the characters 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 string. 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.
"\v" (ASCII 11 (0x0B)), a vertical tab.

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
"