Question

How do I find exact 2, in a string using strpos? Is it possible using strpos? The example below returns “Found” even though the match is NOT exact to what I need. I understand 2, is matching with 22,. It should return “Not Found”. I am matching ID’s in this example.

$string = "21,22,23,26,";
$find = "2,";

$pos = strpos($string, $find);
if ($pos !== false) {
   echo "Found";
} else {
   echo "Not Found";
}

Answer 1

Unless the string is enormous, make an array and search it:

$string = "21,22,23,26,";
$arr = explode(",", $string);

// array_search() returns its position in the array
echo array_search("2", $arr);
// null output, 2 wasn't found

Actually, in_array() is probably faster:

// in_array() returns a boolean indicating whether it is found or not
var_dump(in_array("2", $arr));
// bool(false), 2 wasn't found 
var_dump(in_array("22", $arr));
// bool(true), 22 was found

This will work as long as your string is a comma-delimited list of values. If the string is really long, making an array may be wasteful of memory. Use a string manipulation solution instead.

Addendum

You didn’t specify, but if by some chance these strings came from a database table, I would just add that the appropriate course of action would be to properly normalize it into another table with one row per id rather than store them as a delimited string.