String position problem

Anon

Hi there,

I have a string $mystr. I want a script that can give me the position of the first occurence of string 'x', string 'mytest', string 'house', string 'something else'. Whichever comes first. How can I do this quickly? E.g.:

$mystr = "This is a test: x\n This is something else.";

The string $mystr here contains 'x' and 'something else'. 'x' comes first (position 16). So I want this function to return both 'x' and 16 (using two diff. variables).

Please say it's possible to make a regex string for it. TIA.

Greetz,

Vincent Driessen
Venlo, The Netherlands

Anon

Have you looked into the "strpos" function...it returns the position of a string. You could look for position of both of the first string and then compare it with the first occurence of the second string...
http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.strpos.php3

Anon

Duh!! I knew that already. But what if strpos cannot find anything, let's say it returns "". I have to check all this:

"": string doesn't play a role in all this (ignore that string)
"0": string begins at pos 0 (first strpos).
"16" (or other): string begins at 16 (or so).

You must ignore the "" values, but not the "0" values, and then compare all the string positions (I have approxamately 50 strings) not taking the "" strings in consideration.

How do I do this? I 50-level-deep if statement seems unreasonable to me. TIA.

Greetz,

Vincent Driessen
Venlo, The Netherlands