Find the first space in a string and return the first letter after it

[amandaNHT]

Ok, so I have values like this:

// Names:

$first = 'John Smith';
$second = 'Jane Doe, MD'; 

etc... I need to display "John S" or "Jane D" and I cannot, for the life of me, remember how to do it... I know it's fairly simple, I just can't remember the right combination of string functions to get the parts that I need.

Any suggestions?

EDIT:

For just the first name, I have this:

substr($row['name'], 0,strpos($row['name'], ' ')) 

[amandaNHT]

Ok, nevermind, I got it!

In case you were wondering, this works:

substr($row['name'], 0,(strpos($row['name'], ' ')+2)) 

[iansane6]

I see you got it.

I was going to suggest using something like

$name = explode(" ", $first);

and then use substr to get the first letter out of $name[1]

but the way you got it looks better.

[NogDog]

The strpos() thing is probably best, but just for the fun of it:

<?php
$text = 'John Smith and so forth';
preg_match('#^[^ ]* +[^ ]#', $text, $matches);
echo $matches[0]; // 'John S'
?>

[eval(BadCode)]

Use an anonymous func

<?php

$n = function($str){return $x = strpos(" ",$str)) ? @$str[$x+1] : false;};
$string = "foo";
echo $n($string);

?>

Didn't test it, I always have syntax errors on anonymous functions tho, so you might have to add a quote or ;{}()

Edit: But for the sake of learning something, a "STRING" is really just an array of characters, so it's completely valid to do the following (unless your character is at the end of the string):

<?php
$string = "foobarbaz";
echo $string[strpos($string, "b")+1];
?>

can't do python slices...... yet[::2]

[Nils28]

The strpos() thing is probably best, but just for the fun of it:

<?php
$text = 'John Smith and so forth';
preg_match('#^[^ ]* +[^ ]#', $text, $matches);
echo $matches[0]; // 'John S'
?>

Hmm..
It goes crazy as long as I don't understand the logic behind it !!

This doesn't find the first char (on position 0):

if (strpos($name, $pos))
        echo strpos($name, $pos);
    else
        echo "Not found!"; 

Neither does this:

if (strpos($name, $pos) === true)
        echo strpos($name, $pos);
    else
        echo "Not found!"; 

But this is OK

if (strpos($name, $pos) !== FALSE)
        echo strpos($name, $pos);
    else
        echo "Not found!";

//or


if (strpos($name, $pos) === FALSE)
        echo "Not found!");
    else
        echo strpos($name, $pos);