Remove first 4 characters of a string with PHP

If you’re using a multi-byte character encoding and do not just want to remove the first four bytes like substr does, use the multi-byte counterpart mb_substr. This does of course will also work with single-byte strings.

You could use the substr function to return a substring starting from the 5th character:

$str = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
$str2 = substr($str, 4); // "quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."