Question

I have a string in $str variable.

How can I verify if it starts with some word?

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Example:

$str = "http://somesite.com/somefolder/somefile.php";

When I wrote the following script returns yes

if(strpos($str, "http://") == '0') echo "yes";

BUT it returns yes even when I wrote

if(strpos($str, "other word here") == '0') echo "yes";

I think strpos returns zero if it can’t find substring too (or a value that evaluates to zero).

So, what can I do if I want to verify if word is in the start of string? Maybe I must use === in this case?

Answer 1

You should check with the identity operator (===), see the documentation.

Your test becomes:

if (strpos($str, 'http://') === 0) echo 'yes';

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As @Samuel Gfeller pointed out: As of PHP8 you can use the str_starts_with() method. You can use it like this:

if (str_starts_with($str, 'http://')) echo 'yes';