Find position first occurence of an array of strings in a string

Question

PHP has a function strpos() for finding the position of the first instance of a given value in a string. Is there a way to do this with a needle that is an array of strings? It would give the first occurence:

$str = '1st and 3rd';

str_array_pos($str, array('st', 'nd', 'rd', 'th')) //would return 1 because of 'st'

You could foreach over the needle array, do the strpos() and save the results in an array. You're looking for the min() of all the results. — svens
– svens, Commented Dec 2, 2010 at 0:04

casablanca · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-02 00:04:35Z

3

You could write one yourself:

function str_array_pos($string, $array) {
  for ($i = 0, $n = count($array); $i < $n; $i++)
    if (($pos = strpos($string, $array[$i])) !== false)
      return $pos;
  return false;
}

By the way, the return value in your example should be 0 and not 1 since array indices start at 0.

answered Dec 2, 2010 at 0:04

casablanca

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2 Comments

svens Over a year ago

This doesn't always return the position of the first occurence of any of the needle strings.

lincb Over a year ago

I agree with svens, this still won't be correct if another array element before the correct one also occurs in the string. For instance: str_array_pos('123', array('3', '2', '1')) returns 2 instead of 0, as it should.

Ben · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-02 00:03:26Z

1

array_search() will do that, test with ===false.

answered Dec 2, 2010 at 0:03

Ben

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1 Comment

Ben Over a year ago

On second thought, I don't think this will work for your situation. @Casablanca - noticed right when you were commenting, yours is definitely the correct way, have a +1.

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