PHP: Find position of first occurrence of a string

Description

int strpos ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, int $offset ] )

Returns the numeric position of the first occurrence of needle in the haystack string. Unlike the strrpos() before PHP 5, this function can take a full string as the needle parameter and the entire string will be used.

Parameters

haystack: The string to search in
needle: If needle is not a string, it is converted to an integer and applied as the ordinal value of a character.
offset: The optional offset parameter allows you to specify which character in haystack to start searching. The position returned is still relative to the beginning of haystack .

Return Values

Returns the position as an integer. If needle is not found, strpos() will return boolean FALSE.

Warning

This function may return Boolean FALSE, but may also return a non-Boolean value which evaluates to FALSE, such as 0 or "". Please read the section on Booleans for more information. Use the === operator for testing the return value of this function.

Examples

Example #1 strpos() examples


<?php

$mystring = 'abc';

$findme   = 'a';

$pos = strpos($mystring, $findme);



// Note our use of ===.  Simply == would not work as expected

// because the position of 'a' was the 0th (first) character.

if ($pos === false) {

    echo "The string '$findme' was not found in the string '$mystring'";

} else {

    echo "The string '$findme' was found in the string '$mystring'";

    echo " and exists at position $pos";

}



// We can search for the character, ignoring anything before the offset

$newstring = 'abcdef abcdef';

$pos = strpos($newstring, 'a', 1); // $pos = 7, not 0

?>

Notes

Note: This function is binary-safe.

strpos

Description

Parameters

Return Values

Examples

Notes

See Also