PHP - Check if a string contains a substring

Saturday, 17 July 2010 22:04 Andrew Martin
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In many object-oriented languages, you often want to check for the presence of a substring in a string. PHP does not contain a .contains() method which you can use, but you can create your own using the strpos() function quite easily:

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/**
* Checks to see of a string contains a particular substring
* @param $substring the substring to match
* @param $string the string to search 
* @return true if $substring is found in $string, false otherwise
*/
function contains($substring, $string) {
        $pos = strpos($string, $substring);
 
        if($pos === false) {
                // string needle NOT found in haystack
                return false;
        }
        else {
                // string needle found in haystack
                return true;
        }
 
}

Although this function is not very complex, it can simplify your code by reducing statements like if (strpos($str, $substr) == -1) to simply if (contains($str, $substr).

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Last Updated on Saturday, 17 July 2010 23:49  
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