Question

I have a string like this:

$string = '[Canada] [United States]';

I need to detect something like this

if($string contains Canada) {
 // Do stuff for Canada
}

Answer 1

You could pull out all text between [ and ] and then see if it is found in the resulting array.

preg_match_all('/\[(.*?)\]/', $string, $matches);

if (in_array('Canada', $matches[1])) {
    echo 'Hello, Canada!';
}

CodePad.

If you just used substring searching functions, you’d run the risk that the string you searched for was the substring of a larger block between brackets.