Abstract Three effective methods, namely, the simplified extended tanh-function method (SETFM), variational method (VM) and He’s frequency formulation method (HFFM) are employed to investigate the Fokas system that arises in the monomode optical fibers. Fifteen sets of the soliton solutions such as the bright soliton, dark soliton, bright-dark soliton, double-dark soliton, double-bright soliton, triple-bright soliton, kinky periodic soliton and perfect periodic soliton solutions are developed. The dynamic performances of the different soliton solutions are plotted via the 3-D contours and 2-D curves to interpret the physical behaviors by assigning reasonable parameters. From the results obtained from this study, it is found that three proposed methods are promising ways to seek various soliton solutions of the PDEs in optical physics.