How do I check if a string contains a specific word?

Answer 1

I'm a bit impressed that none of the answers here that used strpos, strstr and similar functions mentioned Multibyte String Functions yet (2015-05-08).

Basically, if you're having trouble finding words with characters specific to some languages, such as German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. (e.g.: ä, é, ô, ç, º, ñ), you may want to precede the functions with mb_. Therefore, the accepted answer would use mb_strpos or mb_stripos (for case-insensitive matching) instead:

if (mb_strpos($a,'are') !== false) {
    echo 'true';
}

If you cannot guarantee that all your data is 100% in UTF-8, you may want to use the mb_ functions.

A good article to understand why is The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky.

Answer 2

Look at strpos():

<?php
    $mystring = 'abc';
    $findme   = 'a';
    $pos = strpos($mystring, $findme);

    // Note our use of ===. Simply, == would not work as expected
    // because the position of 'a' was the 0th (first) character.
    if ($pos === false) {
        echo "The string '$findme' was not found in the string '$mystring'.";
    }
    else {
        echo "The string '$findme' was found in the string '$mystring',";
        echo " and exists at position $pos.";
    }
?>

Answer 3

Here is a little utility function that is useful in situations like this

// returns true if $needle is a substring of $haystack
function contains($needle, $haystack)
{
    return strpos($haystack, $needle) !== false;
}

Answer 4

I had some trouble with this, and finally I chose to create my own solution. Without using regular expression engine:

function contains($text, $word)
{
    $found = false;
    $spaceArray = explode(' ', $text);

    $nonBreakingSpaceArray = explode(chr(160), $text);

    if (in_array($word, $spaceArray) ||
        in_array($word, $nonBreakingSpaceArray)
       ) {

        $found = true;
    }
    return $found;
 }

You may notice that the previous solutions are not an answer for the word being used as a prefix for another. In order to use your example:

$a = 'How are you?';
$b = "a skirt that flares from the waist";
$c = "are";

With the samples above, both $a and $b contains $c, but you may want your function to tell you that only $a contains $c.

Answer 5

Do not use preg_match() if you only want to check if one string is contained in another string. Use strpos() or strstr() instead as they will be faster. (http://in2.php.net/preg_match)

if (strpos($text, 'string_name') !== false){
   echo 'get the string';
}

Answer 6

In order to find a 'word', rather than the occurrence of a series of letters that could in fact be a part of another word, the following would be a good solution.

$string = 'How are you?';
$array = explode(" ", $string);

if (in_array('are', $array) ) {
    echo 'Found the word';
}