Test if a string contains a word in PHP?

Question

In SQL we have NOT LIKE %string%

I need to do this in PHP.

if ($string NOT LIKE %word%) { do something }

I think that can be done with strpos()

But can’t figure out how…

I need exactly that comparission sentence in valid PHP.

if ($string NOT LIKE %word%) { do something }

Solution 1

if (strpos($string, $word) === FALSE) {
   ... not found ...
}

Note that strpos() is case sensitive, if you want a case-insensitive search, use stripos() instead.

Also note the ===, forcing a strict equality test. strpos CAN return a valid 0 if the 'needle' string is at the start of the 'haystack'. By forcing a check for an actual boolean false (aka 0), you eliminate that false positive.

Solution 2

Use strpos. If the string is not found it returns false, otherwise something that is not false. Be sure to use a type-safe comparison (===) as 0 may be returned and it is a falsy value:

if (strpos($string, $substring) === false) {
    // substring is not found in string
}

if (strpos($string, $substring2) !== false) {
    // substring2 is found in string
}

Solution 4

use 

if(stripos($str,'job')){
   // do your work
}

View more solutions

Comments

[Lucas Matos]

note that %word% is a wildcard, not a variable... the $string contains an IP address in char form, like $string = 123.456.789.100, and i want to exclude (NOT LIKE) those that start with 123.456%

[Admin]

@LucasMatos Then $word = "word" then ... while it is a wildcard, it's a very trivial usage ("floating ends") that strpos covers (and in fact it is because of this that strpos works here!). $word = "a?b" would not work with this approach, if ? was meant to "match any character", for instance

[Marc B]

@LUcas: should have said so in the question, then. Simple examples get simple answers.

[Lucas Matos]

thats how my sentence looks like if ($viewer_ip AND $viewer_ip != $last_viewer_ip AND strpos($viewer_ip, 66.249) === false) { i want to exclude google´s bot ips from my counter. just have to wait one of them reach my site to check if its working porperly. thanks u all

[Marc B]

be very careful with a 'bare' floating point number like that. PHP may stringify it with different trailing decimals than you'd expect. Force it to be a string with 66.249 instead, and not that it WILL find things like 166.249. If that's the at the START of the string, you can change the === to a simple > instead, to exclude any matches at the start.

[Jonathan Bergeron]

This will fail if $searchStr is at the beggining of $mixedStr. In that example, if you search for "hello", you will echo "String not here", cause strpos will return 0, which will branch into the else condition. Always use === when checking the return value of strpos.

[mickmackusa]

This will fail when job is the leading three characters of $str. Correcting this unexplained snippet will make it a duplicate answer on this page. This post is safe to remove.

[Ajowi]

and just a note, the substring being looked for in these strpos and stripos should be an actual word like 'this name is reachable and not the Name in thisName'.