Question

I am looking for function which does this option:

preg_match("/^{$STRING}/i", ...)

but, without regular expression, and there must be the ^ in the first, which means that this expression will be false:

$search = "hi", $search_in "ahi";

it must be at the start of the string.

Answer 1

Not sure I understood your request well… But… Try this:

/** Checks if a target string (haystack) starts with a specified string (needle) */
function startsWith($haystack, $needle) {
    return (stripos($haystack, $needle) === 0);
}

/* Usage */
startsWith("ahi", "hi"); // Returns FALSE
startsWith("ahi", "ah"); // Returns TRUE

Please note that you need to use 3 = signs, because the function will return false when there is no match in the string.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.stripos.php