Finding a number within a string

[WebRuss]

Hi All

Perhaps someone has a solution:

I have a string like so:
"1#2#3#4#21#25#"

I want to know of this string contains the character "21"

However using strstr does not work as it always returns false:

$string = "21";
$container = "1#2#3#4#21#25#";

if(strstr($container,$string)) {
     echo "found it.";
} else {
     echo "not found.";
}

Does anyone have any ideas?

Regards
Russ

[tsinka]

Hi,

the code works fine on my server. But I see another problem. Let's say you want to search for 2 then your code would return true if the string is e.g. 1#5#21# because 21 contains a 2.

Try the following code:

if (preg_match("§(^|#)$string(#|$)§",$container)) {
  echo "found it.";
} else {
  echo "not found.";
}

[WebRuss]

I feel stupid I had the variable values reversed.

Thanks for your help!

Regards
Russ

[TheDefender]

Why not use explode to put the string into an array? That way, you can check for the numbers individually using the [man]in_array[/man] function, instead of relying on string manipulation:

example:

$valuecheck = "21";
$string = "2#21#35#3#78#12#90#";
$stringArray = explode("#", $string);
if(in_array($valuecheck, $stringArray)){
	echo "Yep, $valuecheck is in there!";
} else {
	echo "Nope, $valuecheck is not in there!";
}

I just suggest this, because I personally like to avoid regular expressions as much as I possibly can. 😃