Question

I basically need a function to check whether a string’s characters (each character) is in an array.

My code isn’t working so far, but here it is anyway,

$allowedChars = array("a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z"," ","A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z"," ","0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"," ","@",".","-","_","+"," ");

$input = "Test";
$input = str_split($input);

if (in_array($input,$allowedChars)) {echo "Yep, found.";}else {echo "Sigh, not found...";}

I want it to say ‘Yep, found.’ if one of the letters in $input is found in $allowedChars. Simple enough, right? Well, that doesn’t work, and I haven’t found a function that will search a string’s individual characters for a value in an array.

By the way, I want it to be just those array’s values, I’m not looking for fancy html_strip_entities or whatever it is, I want to use that exact array for the allowed characters.

Answer 1

You really should look into regex and the preg_match function: http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

But, this should make your specific request work:

$allowedChars = array("a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z"," ","A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z"," ","0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"," ","@",".","-","_","+"," ");
$input = "Test";
$input = str_split($input);
$message = "Sigh, not found...";
foreach($input as $letter) {
    if (in_array($letter, $allowedChars)) {
        $message = "Yep, found.";
        break;
    }
}
echo $message;