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Understanding the different PHP search string functionality easily

As internet boomed in this generation, along with the search engine websites with its capability of searching website contents in an easy and fast manner. Not only search engine websites adopted the search functionality but even almost all websites wanted to have the ease of searching their own site contents whether a static or database driven contents for it adds a good factor for their own users.

With regards to PHP search string there are lots of functions available in the PHP library. You just need to check which one is appropriate for your own need. There are also some custom made codes made by other programmers which are also accessible in the internet.

Let’s examine some of the php search functions.

strpos – Use to find position of first occurrence of a string. It returns the numeric position of the first occurrence of needle in the haystack string as an integer. If needle is not found, it will return Boolean FALSE.

Syntax:

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

Example: In the sample code below we have the $mystring as the variable which contains the string abc and $findme variable for the string or character we are looking for. These variables are being passed on the strpos function and the position of it as the result as an integer type is stored in $pos variable.

On the second part of the code we have the checking if we are able to find the position of the string we’re looking for. This function actually in some way is also helpful not only searching for the position of the string but also to identify if that string exist hence boolean false will be returned by the function if we’re not able to find the position of it.

<?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”;
}
?>

There are still lots of PHP string function like the strpos for different usage. This time let’s take a look at regular expression. Regular expression on the other hand is very efficient for search string problems because it provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. One of the functions that use regular expression is preg_match.

preg_ match — It performs a regular expression match. Searches subject for a match to the regular expression given in pattern. It returns the number of times pattern matches. That will be either 0 times (no match) or 1 time because preg_match() will stop searching after the first match. It returns FALSE if an error occurred.

Syntax: int preg_match ( string $pattern , string $subject [, array &$matches [, int $flags [, int $offset ]]] )

Example: On the sample code below the 1^st argument is /php/i which means we would be searching for the word php and ‘i’ stands for case-insensitive in the 2^nd argument which contains the whole string where we’re going to find the word ‘php’.

<?php
// The ”i” after the pattern delimiter indicates a case-insensitive search
if (preg_match(“/php/i”, ”PHP is the web scripting language of choice.”)) {
echo ”A match was found.”;
} else {
echo ”A match was not found.”;
}
?>

These are just actually some sample php string functions already available in the PHP library but there are still more depending on your need.