str_starts_with in PHP 8

March 27, 2025

In my application, I was handling a querying function to fetch data only if the query was a SELECT statement or similar.

Initially, I used the following code:

if (stripos(trim($query), 'SELECT') === 0) {
  //do the fetching
}

Later, I had to add other conditions since I was calling some stored procedures. The statement ended up like this:

if (stripos(trim($query), 'SELECT') === 0 || stripos(trim($query), 'CALL')) {
  //do the fetching
}

But it was not looking good at all, felt quite verbose.

Upon researching, I found that PHP 8 introduced a new string function called str_starts_with to check if a string starts with a particular character or substring:

if (str_starts_with($query, 'SELECT') || str_starts_with($query, 'CALL')) {
  //do the fetching
}

Looking good, right? :-)

#php
#string