How can the PHP function "substr()" be used to manipulate strings, such as removing trailing characters like commas, as discussed in the forum thread?

To remove trailing characters like commas from a string in PHP, you can use the substr() function along with the rtrim() function. The substr() function can be used to extract a portion of the string, and rtrim() can then be used to remove any specified characters from the end of the string. By combining these two functions, you can easily manipulate strings to remove trailing characters like commas.

$string = "Hello, World,";
$cleanedString = rtrim($string, ',');
echo $cleanedString;