stristr and stripos in PHP

stristr and stripos are string functions in PHP that are used for case-insensitive searching within strings. They are useful for finding occurrences of substrings regardless of their letter casing. Here’s an explanation of each function:

1. stristr function:

• Syntax: stristr(string $haystack, mixed $needle, bool $before_needle = false)
• Returns: Returns the portion of $haystack starting from the first occurrence of $needle (case-insensitive), or false if $needle is not found.
• The optional $before_needle parameter, when set to true, returns the portion of the haystack before the needle.

Example:

$string = "Hello, world!";
$substring = "world";
$result = stristr($string, $substring); // Returns "world!"

2. stripos function:

• Syntax: stripos(string $haystack, string $needle, int $offset = 0)
• Returns: Returns the numeric position of the first occurrence of $needle in $haystack (case-insensitive), or false if $needle is not found.
• The optional $offset parameter allows you to start searching from a specific position within the haystack.

Example:

$string = "Hello, world!";
$substring = "World";
$position = stripos($string, $substring); // Returns 7

Here’s how you might use these functions:

$string = "Hello, world!";
$substring = "World";

// Using stristr to get the portion of the string
$portion = stristr($string, $substring);
echo $portion; // Outputs "world!"

// Using stripos to get the position of the substring
$position = stripos($string, $substring);
if ($position !== false) {
    echo "Substring found at position: $position";
} else {
    echo "Substring not found";
}

Keep in mind that both stristr and stripos are case-insensitive, so they can be very useful when you want to search for substrings in a way that doesn’t depend on letter casing.