Question

Is there a better method than loop with strpos()?

Not i’m looking for partial matches and not an in_array() type method.

example needle and haystack and desired return:

$needles[0] = 'naan bread';
$needles[1] = 'cheesestrings';
$needles[2] = 'risotto';
$needles[3] = 'cake';

$haystack[0] = 'bread';
$haystack[1] = 'wine';
$haystack[2] = 'soup';
$haystack[3] = 'cheese';

//desired output - but what's the best method of getting this array?
$matches[0] = 'bread';
$matches[1] = 'cheese';

ie:

magic_function($haystack, %$needles%) !

Answer 1

I think you are confusing $haystack and $needle in your question, because naan bread is not in haystack, nor is cheesestring. Your desired output suggests you are looking for cheese in cheesestring instead. For that, the following would work:

function in_array_multi($haystack, $needles)
{
    $matches = array();
    $haystack = implode('|', $haystack);
    foreach($needles as $needle) {
        if(strpos($haystack, $needle) !== FALSE) {
            $matches[] = $needle;
        }
    }
    return $matches;
}

For your given haystack and needles this performs twice as fast as a regex solution. Might change for different number of params though.