从字符串的开头删除空格和加号

Question

I have a string that begins with an empty space and a + sign :

$s = ' +This is a string[...]';

I can't figure out how to remove the first + sign using PHP. I've tried ltrim, preg_replace with several patterns and with trying to escape the + sign, I've also tried substr and str_replace. None of them is removing the plus sign at the beginning of the string. Either it doesn't replace it or it remplace/remove the totality of the string. Any help will be highly appreciated!

Edit : After further investigation, it seems that it's not really a plus sign, it looks 100% like a + sign but I think it's not. Any ideas for how to decode/convert it?

Edit 2 : There's one white space before the + sign. I'm using get_the_excerpt Wordpress function to get the string.

Edit 3 : After successfully removing the empty space and the + with substr($s, 2);, Here's what I get now :

$s == '#43;This is a string[...]'

Wiki : I had to remove 6 characters, I've tried substr($s, 6); and it's working well now. Thanks for your help guys.

Answer 1

ltrim has second parameter

$s = ltrim($s,'+');

edit:

if it is not working it means that there is sth else at the beginning of that string, eg. white spaces. You can check it by using var_dump($s); which shows you exactly what you have there.