喜欢搜索每个逗号分隔值的前三个字符

Question

In a string,

$string_example = "cats, dogs, horses"

I'd like to get

$string_truncated = "cat, dog, hor"

i.e. getting the first three characters of each comma separated value

Later, I will use this in an SQL LIKE statement to restrict search results that match at least the first three characters given (I can't do FULL TEXT because I want to keep my foreign key constraints and can't give up my DB engine)

Answer 1

$string_example = "cats, dogs, horses";
$arr = explode(',',$string_example);
$newArr = array();
foreach($arr as $val){
  if($val != ''){
     $newArr[] = substr(trim($val),0,3); 
  }
}
$newStr = implode(', ',$newArr);
echo $newStr;