What is the name of the first letter in a word

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Q: What is the first letter of a word called?

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Перевод задания
Первые буквы этих слов образуют новое слово. Какое? Напиши.
Слово − … .

 
ОТВЕТ
1. Mouse.
2. Orange.
3. Up.
4. Nine.
5. Train.
6. Ant.
7. Ice cream.
8. Nest

The word is “MOUNTAIN”
Перевод ответа
1. Мышь;
2. Апельсин;
3. Вверх;
4. Девять;
5. Поезд;
6. Муравей;
7. Мороженое;
8. Гнездо.
Слово – «ГОРА»

The best way to accomplish this is with regular expressions.

Lets break down what you want in a logical way: You want every character from the string is at the beginning of a word. The best way to identify those characters is to look for those characters that are preceded by white space.

So we start with a lookbehind for that space character, followed by any character:

/(?<=s)./

This will find any character preceded by a space. But — the first character in the string is a character in the string is one you want extract. And because it’s the first character in the string, it can’t be preceded by a space. So we want to match anything preceded by a space or the first character in the string, so we add a start-of-subject assertion:

/(?<=s|^)./

Now we are getting closer. But what if the string contains blocks of multiple spaces? What if it contains a space followed by a punctuation character? We probably don’t want to match any of those, in fat we probably just want to match letters. We can do that with «any word character» w escape sequence. And we can make are expression case-insensitive using the i modifier as well as u modifier to support utf-8 characters.

So we end up with:

/(?<=s|^)w/iu

But how do we actually use this in PHP? Well we want to match all occurrences of the regular expression within the string so we use (you guessed it) preg_match_all():

$string = "Progress in Veterinary Science";

$expr = '/(?<=s|^)w/iu';
preg_match_all($expr, $string, $matches);

Now we have all the characters we wanted to extract. To construct the result string you show, we need to join them together again:

$result = implode('', $matches[0]);

…and we need to ensure that they are all upper-case:

$result = mb_strtoupper($result);

And that’s really all there is to it.

See it working

Here’s a slightly compressed version, using the alternative regex from Leigh’s comment to «capture the initial letters of words separated by hyphens, full stops, etc.» (rather than only spaces.)

$str="Foo Bar";
preg_match_all('/(?<=b)w/iu',$str,$matches);
$result=mb_strtoupper(implode('',$matches[0]));

As explained by others, classical way consist in iterating over each word of your initial string, reduce the word to its first letter, and combine those first letters together.

Here is a helper method combining the different steps.

/**
 * @return string
 */
function getInitials($string = null) {
    return array_reduce(
        explode(' ', $string),
        function ($initials, $word) {
            return sprintf('%s%s', $initials, substr($word, 0, 1));
        },
        ''
    );
}

NB : this will return an empty string in case the given string is empty.

getInitials('Community College District')

string ‘CCD’ (length=3)

getInitials()

string » (length=0)

getInitials('Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet')

string ‘Lidsa’ (length=5)

Of course you can add filters to the callback function of array_reduce(), such as strtoupper() if you prefer only uppercased initials for instance.

answered Mar 26, 2017 at 11:53

$temp = explode(' ', $string);
$result = '';
foreach($temp as $t)
    $result .= $t[0];

answered Mar 14, 2012 at 16:58

$str = 'I am a String!';
echo implode('', array_map(function($v) { return $v[0]; }, explode(' ', $str)));

// would output IaaS

answered May 28, 2013 at 11:38

Something I’ve cooked up.

/**
 * Return the first letter of each word in uppercase - if it's too long.
 *
 * @param string $str
 * @param int $max
 * @param string $acronym
 * @return string
 */
function str_acronym($str, $max = 12, $acronym = '')
{
    if (strlen($str) <= $max) return $str;

    $words = explode(' ', $str);

    foreach ($words as $word)
    {
        $acronym .= strtoupper(substr($word, 0, 1));
    }

    return $acronym;
}

answered Oct 12, 2015 at 11:41

function acronym( $string = '' ) {
    $words = explode(' ', $string);
    if ( ! $words ) {
        return false;
    }
    $result = '';
    foreach ( $words as $word ) $result .= $word[0];
    return strtoupper( $result );
}

answered Mar 14, 2012 at 17:06

Why not using the str_word_count function for this?

1. get each word as a row in an array

2. reduce that array to the first letter

   $acronym = array_reduce(
   str_word_count(«Community College District», 1),
   function($res , $w){
   return $res . $w[0];
   }
   );

answered Mar 1, 2019 at 13:39

Assuming that the original string is properly built (trimmed and without double spaces), this is what I do:

$name = 'John Doe';
$initials = implode( '', array_map( function ( $part ) { 
    return strtoupper( $part['0'] );
}, explode( ' ', $name ) ) );

Basically, breaking the string into words, extracting & capitalizing the first character of a word, and gluing them back together.

answered Feb 2, 2021 at 15:55

I think you have to explode and join them back again …..

<?php
$string  = "Progress in Veterinary Science";
$pieces = explode(" ", $string);
$str="";
foreach($pieces as $piece)
{
    $str.=$piece[0];
}    
echo $str; /// it will result into  "PiVS"
?>

answered Apr 23, 2013 at 8:37

If there are more number of spaces between two letters in the input string then try this.

function first_letter($str)
{
    $arr2 = array_filter(array_map('trim',explode(' ', $str)));
    $result='';
    foreach($arr2 as $v)
    {
        $result.=$v[0];
    }
    return $result;
}

$str="    Let's   try   with    more   spaces       for  fun .   ";

echo first_letter($str);

Demo1

Alternative of same code

function first_letter($str)
{
    return implode('', array_map(function($v) { return $v[0]; },array_filter(array_map('trim',explode(' ', $str)))));;
}

$str="    Let's   try   with    more   spaces       for  fun .   ";

echo first_letter($str);

Demo2

answered Feb 26, 2016 at 12:43

Try this-

$strs=explode(" ",$string);

foreach($strs as $str)
  echo $str[0];

answered Apr 23, 2013 at 8:34

Something like this should do the trick :

$string = 'Some words in a string';
$words = explode(' ', $string); // array of word
foreach($words as $word){
    echo $word[0]; // first letter
}

answered Apr 23, 2013 at 8:37

<?php $arr = explode(" ",$String);

foreach($arr as $s)
{
   echo substr($s,0,1);
}

?>

firstly I explode string by spaces then I substr first char.

http://php.net/substr

http://php.net/explode

I like Reg Expression over any other method of string extraction, but if you are unfamiliar with Reg Ex then hear is a method using the explode() PHP function:

$string = "David Beckham";
$string_split = explode(" ", $string);
$inititals = $string_split[0][0] . $string_split[1][0];
echo $inititals;

Obviously the above code will only work on a name containing two words.

answered Jan 6, 2016 at 9:38

This answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/33080232/1046909 but with multibyte strings support:

if (!function_exists('str_acronym')) {
    function str_acronym(string $str, int $min = -1, string $prefix = null): string
    {
        if (mb_strlen($str) <= $min) {
            return $str;
        };

        $words = explode(' ', $str);

        $acronym = strval($prefix);

        foreach ($words as $word) {
            if ($word = trim($word)) {
                $acronym .= mb_strtoupper(mb_substr($word, 0, 1));
            }
        }

        return $acronym;
    }
}

answered Aug 19, 2019 at 15:34

You can use that function based on the accepted answer from @Michael Berkowski

function buildAcronym($string, $length = 1) {
    $words = explode(" ", $string);
    $acronym = "";
    $length = (self::is_empty($string) || $length <= 0 ? 1 : $length);

    foreach ($words as $i => $w) {
        $i += 1;
        if($i <= $length) {
            $acronym .= $w[0];
        }
    }

    return $acronym;
}

The $length parameter determines how many chars you want to display

USAGE:

$acronym = buildAcronym("Hello World", 2);

answered May 11, 2020 at 20:33

I’m a little underwhelmed by the suggested techniques here (despite having so many to choose from).

Assuming your input string is solely composed of whitespace delimited «words» (and you don’t need to validate that the first character of each word is an actual letter), you can use this concise, multibyte safe technique to trim all letters after the first letter from each word and also discard the delimiting whitespaces.

Code: (Demo)

$string = "Let's observe obviously knowledgeable approaches that target helpful items succinctly";

echo preg_replace('~SKS*s*~u', '', $string);

Output:

Lookatthis

If you want to specifically target «letters», you can use p{Ll} and non-letters with P{Ll} (as replacements for S and s. The K restarts the fullstring match — by effect, the matched first matched letter of each word is «set free» before matching more characters to be replaced by the empty string.

I see some other approaches on this page that are using lookbehinds to match the first letter of each word with preg_match_all('~(?<=s|b)pL~u', ...), but notice the effect on fringe cases:

$string = "Let's check some fringe-cases: like @mentions and email@example";
#matches:  ^   ^ ^     ^    ^      ^      ^     ^        ^   ^     ^

I cannot say if these would be desirable results, but if they were, then the pattern could be distilled to ~bpL~u because the word boundary (b) is a zero-length assertion that doesn’t require a lookbehind AND it covers every character that s could match.

I should also mention that any of the answers on this page that are accessing the first character by its offset (using array-like syntax like $word[0]) or substr() will fail whenever a multibyte character is encountered.

answered Apr 1, 2022 at 23:35