(PHP 4, PHP 5)
strpos — Find position of first occurrence of a string
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.
The string to search in
If needle is not a string, it is converted to an integer and applied as the ordinal value of a character.
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 .
Returns the position as an integer. If needle is not found, strpos() will return boolean FALSE.
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.
Example #1 Using ===
<?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";
}
?>
Example #2 Using !==
<?php
$mystring = 'abc';
$findme = 'a';
$pos = strpos($mystring, $findme);
// The !== operator can also be used. Using != would not work as expected
// because the position of 'a' is 0. The statement (0 != false) evaluates
// to false.
if ($pos !== false) {
echo "The string '$findme' was found in the string '$mystring'";
echo " and exists at position $pos";
} else {
echo "The string '$findme' was not found in the string '$mystring'";
}
?>
Example #3 Using an offset
<?php
// We can search for the character, ignoring anything before the offset
$newstring = 'abcdef abcdef';
$pos = strpos($newstring, 'a', 1); // $pos = 7, not 0
?>
Note: This function is binary-safe.