So I have a delimited string and I need to get the substring before the delimiter, let's take an example:
This string - DeleteMe please and some other text So I want to find DDeleteMe please and some other text and remove it, because all I need is This string.
So everything before the dash - or how does DeleteMe please and some other text qualifies to be deleted?
If so, you need no regex, you can do it with substr and strpos:
$string = "This string - DeleteMe please and some other text"; $string = trim(substr($string, 0, strpos($string, '-'))); You could also use explode():
$parts = explode('-', $string); $string = trim($parts[0]); Try this:
$fixed_string = preg_replace("(\s-.*)$", "", $your_string); You don't need regex.
$str = 'This string - DeleteMe please and some other text'; $str = substr($str, 0, strpos($str, '-') - 1); 
'This string-DeleteMe' ? Would result in This strin.
substr gives you the substring up to (excluding) a certain index. In your example you subtract one, which removes (in case the previous character to the index is not a space) one character too much.substr works. As I said, in the original example the delimiter is ' - ' (i.e. space dash space). I wrote my code to work with that (note the lack of trim).' - ' ;) Ok never mind...$str = preg_replace('\s*-\s*DeleteMe.*$','', $str) 
-?