How to Remove the Last Character from a String in PHP

While working with PHP, it is often necessary to remove characters from strings.

In this snippet, we are going to show you several PHP functions that allow removing the last character from a particular string.

Option 1: substr

The substr function extracts a substring. To remove the last character, specify a negative length:

php substr function syntax

<‌?php

substr($string, 0, -1);

?>

A simple example of the substr function is illustrated below:

php substr function

<‌?php

$string = "Hello World!";
echo "Given string: " . $string . "\n";
echo "Updated string: " . substr($string, 0, -1) . "\n";

?>

Try it Yourself »

The output will look as follows:

php substr function output

Given string: Hello World!
Updated string: Hello World

Note: For multibyte strings (e.g., UTF-8), use mb_substr($string, 0, -1, 'UTF-8') to avoid cutting characters in half. Also, if the string is empty or contains only one character, the function will return an empty string.

Option 2: substr_replace

The substr_replace function replaces part of a string. To remove the last character, replace it with an empty string:

php substr replace syntax

<‌?php

substr_replace($string, "", -1);

?>

And here is an example of using the substr_replace function:

php substr replace

<‌?php

$string = "Hello World!";
echo "Given string: " . $string . "\n";
echo "Updated string: " . substr_replace($string, "", -1) . "\n";

?>

Try it Yourself »

And, here is the output:

php substr replace output

Given string: Hello World!
Updated string: Hello World

Option 3: rtrim

The rtrim function removes trailing whitespace or specified characters from the end of a string. It removes all trailing occurrences of the characters in the mask, not just the last character. To remove a specific trailing character, pass it as the second argument:

php rtrim

<‌?php

rtrim($string, "!");

?>

So, an example of removing the character will look as follows:

php remove string character

<‌?php

$string = "Hello World!";
echo "Given string: " . $string . "\n";
echo "Updated string: " . rtrim($string, "!") . "\n";

?>

Try it Yourself »

And, the output is the following:

php remove character from string output

Given string: Hello World!
Updated string: Hello World

So, in this snippet, we discussed three ways of removing the last character from a string in PHP. These are simple actions that will help you to deal with one of the common issues in PHP.