Searching the contents of a variable

[Ace_Online]

I am new to php, and I am wondering how I could say "
$variable = "some sentence with multiple words";
if ($variable doesn't contain 'special word')"

So in other words, how do you go about searching a variable for the occurance of certain characters? and then saying, "if the variable doesn't have those characters".

I've heard of functions used for searching a string, but is a "string" what the variable is equal to in this case?

Thanks in advance!

[jayant]

Use ereg() function.

[theeper]

Try using strstr()

$string_1 = "text";
$string_2 = "this is the text string";

if(strstr($string_2,$string_1)) {
echo "yes";
} else {
echo "No";
}

[jerdo]

You could use
if (!preg_match("/special word/",$variable))
{
do whatever
}

And in your example yes $variable is a string