Delete symbol from the last position of a string, optimally with PHP

Question

I would like to delete the last character of a string if it is a symbol. I know I could do it in a complex way like the following function:

$string = "minha_string_com_simbolo_no_final_";

function excluir($string){
    $simbolos = ["'","\"", "@","#","$","%","&","*", "(",")","-","_","+","=","
    [","]","§","ª","º","{","}","´","`","^","~","?","/",";",":",",",".",",
    ",">","\\","|","¬","¢","£"]; 

    if(array_search(substr($string, -1), $simbolos)){
       return substr_replace($string, '', -1);
    }
}

Or extremely simple as the solution below with regular expression:

$string = "minha_string_com_simbolo_no_final_";

print preg_replace("/\W$/", "", $string); 

Which option has a better performance?

What is the right way to test beanckmark in PHP when we come across these cases?

Answer 1

I believe the second option is more optimized.

$string = "minha_string_com_simbolo_no_final_";
print preg_replace("/\W$/", "", $string); 

Because it is a regular expression whose purpose is to provide a concise and flexible way of identifying strings of interest. A regular expression is made to identify patterns so you would opt for the second option. This reference has some reasons to use and abuse expressions:
http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/10-reasons-to-learn-and-use-regular-expressions

If you want to do performance tests you can take a look at Xdebug.

I hope I’ve helped.