String Functions
PHP Manual

strpos

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

strposFind position of first occurrence of a string

Description

int strpos ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, int $offset = 0 ] )

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.

See Also


String Functions
PHP Manual