WeberDev.com -> PHP Manual -> 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 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
?>

Notes

Note: This function is binary-safe.

strpos

Description

Parameters

Return Values

Examples

Notes

See Also