[cebuy]

OK I have a variable that often has a colon ":" in the value.
Example: $state_city = "North Carolina : Durham"

If I want to name another variable $city and only want to get the characters after ":", how do I do that?

Result would be $city = "Durham"

Also want to do some kind of check as well for the presence of the : and there is also the possibility of more than one colon, and all I want is the characters after the last colon. Example if it said with 2 colons

$city_state= "USA:North Caolinaurham"
I still want to it to be $city = "Durham"

If it is does not have a colon, I would like for it to just to take the entire text....
$state_city = "Durham"
and give reult as
$city = "Durham"

I know there must be a combination of an "if else" loop and a certain way to grab only the characters to the right of the last colon, but my newbie php skills are not up to task yet. Any help from a master of the craft would be great appreciated! Thanks!

[Larry Kubin]

Use the strpos() function to determine the position of the ':' in the string. Then use the substr() function to get a substring starting from the character after that position to the end of the string.

I believe this is what you are trying to do:

Code:

$state_city = 'North Carolina : Durham';
$position = strpos($state_city, ':'); 
$city = substr($state_city, $position);

To test if the ':' exists, you can use strpos(). It returns false if the character you are searching for does not exist in the string. Now that I think about it, since you want to test for multiple colon characters, you should strrpos() instead. It will find the position of the last occurrence of the character you are searching for, and false if the character is not found. So this will probably do what you want:

Code:

if($position = strrpos($state_city, ':')) {
  $city = substr($state_city, $position);
}
else {
  $city = $state_city;
}