Remove the last character from a string

What is fastest way to remove the last character from a string?

I have a string like

a,b,c,d,e,

I would like to remove the last ‘,’ and get the remaining string back:

OUTPUT: a,b,c,d,e

What is the fastest way to do this?

Answer

Contrary to the question asked, rtrim() will remove any number of characters, listed in the second argument, from the end of the string. In case you expect just a single comma, the following code would do:

$newarraynama = rtrim($arraynama, ",");

But in my case I had 2 characters, a comma and a space, so I had to change to

$newarraynama = rtrim($arraynama, " ,");

and now it would remove all commas and spaces from the end of the string, returning a, b, c, d, e either from a, b, c, d, e,, a, b, c, d, e,,,, a, b, c, d, e, or a, b, c, d, e , ,, , ,

But in case there could be multiple commas but you need to remove only the last one, then rtrim() shouldn’t be used at all – see other answers for the solution that directly answers the question.

However, rtrim() could be a good choice if you don’t know whether the extra character could be present or not. Unlike substr-based solutions it will return a, b, c, d, e from a, b, c, d, e