Isolate leading portion of string before first hyphen and omit any trailing spaces from match

I have my working code which extracts the title from a string, but right now it still isn’t very flexible.

Current code:

$post_title = "THIS IS A TEST - 10-01-2010 - HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!";
$post_title = substr($post_title, 0, strpos($post_title, '-') - 1);

I want to get the title of the string, which is at the start of the string and goes until the first dash. I don’t want to get the spaces before the dash and it could be that there is no dash at all.

The output of the current code works and outputs THIS IS A TEST, but the current code doesn’t work for the following cases, so I need a more flexible code:

• THIS IS A TEST – 10-01-2010 – HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!
• THIS IS A TEST-10-01-2010 – HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!
• THIS IS A TEST – – – – 10-01-2010 – HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!
• THIS IS A TEST

So the title can exist without a - and someone could forget to put a space between the -, equally, someone could put too many spaces.

The output for all the above cases should always be THIS IS A TEST with no spaces at the end.

With the code I have, the only one that works is the first one.

$title= explode('-', $post_title);
$post_title=trim($title[0]);
$trimmedTitle=$post_title;

$str = "THIS IS A TEST -0-01-2010 - HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!";
preg_match("/^([ws]+)s*-?/m", $str, $m);
print_r($m);

Answer

Use explode() with the “-” as a delimiter to split it into chunks based on the presence of the “-” and then take the first portion and use trim() to trim the trailing spaces to give the title with no trailing spaces. This gives “THIS IS A TEST” in all the provided test cases. If there are no dashes then the entire string is returned.

<?php

    $str = 'THIS IS A TEST - 10-01-2010 - HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!';
    $title= explode('-', $str);
    $trimmedTitle=trim($title[0]);
    print_r($trimmedTitle);

    //$trimmedTitle ='THIS IS A TEST 

?>

I have tested this against:

THIS IS A TEST - 10-01-2010 - HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!
THIS IS A TEST-10-01-2010 - HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!
THIS IS A TEST - - - - 10-01-2010 - HELLO WORLD (OKAY)!!
THIS IS A TEST

and each returns THIS IS A TEST with no trailing spaces