why won't ereg() or eregi() work within a function? any similar function?

[marcnyc]

I am having problems using ereg/eregi within a function... The function where I want to use ereg in is then called by another function to generate a page... I get an error saying
Fatal error: Call to undefined function

Is there anything I need to do so that I can use ereg within a function?

If not, or if my question doesn't make any sense, is there any other easy function I can use to basically check if a specific word is contained inside a variable?? something like:

if ( $variable CONTAINS "word" )

Thanks

[Weedpacket]

ereg() does work inside a function. Perhaps if we saw some code we could tell you where you're really going wrong.

[ucbones]

[man]strpos()[/man] should do the job better than [man]ereg()[/man] surely?

[marcnyc]

I found the problem in my code...
in my if statement:

if ( ereg("string",$var) ) { $this = $that }

I didn't have the ; at the end of $that...
I am a little confused because I thought I did see code somewhere where inside an if statement the ; was removed... was I wrong?

sorry if I wasted your time...