Yes. Strings can be seen as character arrays, and the way to access a position of an array is to use the []
operator. Usually there’s no problem at all in using $str[0]
(and I’m pretty sure is much faster than the substr()
method).
There is only one caveat with both methods: they will get the first byte, rather than the first character. This is important if you’re using multibyte encodings (such as UTF-8). If you want to support that, use mb_substr()
. Arguably, you should always assume multibyte input these days, so this is the best option, but it will be slightly slower.