What are some best practices for efficiently checking the starting character of a string in PHP?

When checking the starting character of a string in PHP, it's important to do so efficiently to avoid unnecessary processing. One common and efficient way to check the starting character of a string is to use the substr() function to extract the first character and then compare it to the desired character. This approach avoids unnecessary string manipulation and is more performant. 

// Check if the starting character of a string is 'A'
$string = "Apple";
if(substr($string, 0, 1) === 'A') {
    echo "The string starts with 'A'";
} else {
    echo "The string does not start with 'A'";
}

Keywords

PHP string character efficiency comparison

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