I think you could probably just remove all the whitespace characters you care about (e.g., what about hyphenations?) and test for " word ":
var_dump(firstWordPosition('Will company any do any job, (are there any)?', 'any'));
var_dump(firstWordPosition('Will *any* company do *any* job, (are there any)?', 'any'));
function firstWordPosition($str, $word) {
// There are others, maybe also pass this in or array_merge() for more control.
$nonchars = ["'",'"','.',',','!','?','(',')','^','$','#','\n','\r\n','\t',];
// You could also do a strpos() with an if and another argument passed in.
// Note that we're padding the $str to with spaces to match begin/end.
$pos = stripos(str_replace($nonchars, ' ', " $str "), " $word ");
// Have to account for the for-space on " $str ".
return $pos ? $pos - 1: false;
}
Gives 12 (offset from 0)
https://3v4l.org/qh9Rb
Answer from Jared Farrish on Stack OverflowI think you could probably just remove all the whitespace characters you care about (e.g., what about hyphenations?) and test for " word ":
var_dump(firstWordPosition('Will company any do any job, (are there any)?', 'any'));
var_dump(firstWordPosition('Will *any* company do *any* job, (are there any)?', 'any'));
function firstWordPosition($str, $word) {
// There are others, maybe also pass this in or array_merge() for more control.
$nonchars = ["'",'"','.',',','!','?','(',')','^','$','#','\n','\r\n','\t',];
// You could also do a strpos() with an if and another argument passed in.
// Note that we're padding the $str to with spaces to match begin/end.
$pos = stripos(str_replace($nonchars, ' ', " $str "), " $word ");
// Have to account for the for-space on " $str ".
return $pos ? $pos - 1: false;
}
Gives 12 (offset from 0)
https://3v4l.org/qh9Rb
<?php
$subject = "any";
$b = " ";
$delimited = "$b$subject$b";
$replace = array("?","*","(",")",",",".");
$str = "Will *any* company do *any* job, (are there any)?";
echo "\nThe string: \"$str\"";
$temp = str_replace($replace,$b,$str);
while ( ($pos = strpos($temp,$delimited)) !== false )
{
echo "\nThe subject \"$subject\" occurs at position ",($pos + 1);
for ($i=0,$max=$pos + 1 + strlen($subject); $i <= $max; $i++) {
$temp[$i] = $b;
}
}
See demo
The script defines a word boundary as a blank space. If the string has non-alphabetical characters, they are replaced with blank space and the result is stored in $temp. As the loop iterates and detects $subject, each of its characters changes into a space in order to locate the next appearance of the subject. Considering the amount of work involved one may wonder if such effort really pays off compared to using a regex with a preg_ function. That is something that one will have to decide themselves. My purpose was to show how this may be achieved using strpos() without resorting to the oft repeated conventional wisdom of SO which advocates using a regex.
There is an option if you are loathe to create a replacement array of non-alphabetical characters, as follows:
<?php
function getAllWholeWordPos($s,$word){
$b = " ";
$delimited = "$b$word$b";
$retval = false;
for ($i=0, $max = strlen( $s ); $i < $max; $i++) {
if ( !ctype_alpha( $s[$i] ) ){
$s[$i] = $b;
}
}
while ( ( $pos = stripos( $s, $delimited) ) !== false ) {
$retval[] = $pos + 1;
for ( $i=0, $max = $pos + 1 + strlen( $word ); $i <= $max; $i++) {
$s[$i] = $b;
}
}
return $retval;
}
$whole_word = "any";
$str = "Will *$whole_word* company do *$whole_word* job, (are there $whole_word)?";
echo "\nString: \"$str\"";
$result = getAllWholeWordPos( $str, $whole_word );
$times = count( $result );
echo "\n\nThe word \"$whole_word\" occurs $times times:\n";
foreach ($result as $pos) {
echo "\nPosition: ",$pos;
}
See demo
Note, this example with its update improves the code by providing a function which uses a variant of strpos(), namely stripos() which has the added benefit of being case insensitive. Despite the more labor-intensive coding, the performance is speedy; see performance.
According to the PHP manual, yes- strpos() is the quickest way to determine if one string contains another.
Note:
If you only want to determine if a particular needle occurs within haystack, use the faster and less memory intensive function strpos() instead.
This is quoted time and again in any php.net article about other string comparators (I pulled this one from strstr())
Although there are two changes that should be made to your statement.
if (strpos($storage->getMessage($i),'chocolate') !== FALSE)
This is because if(0) evaluates to false (and therefore doesn't run), however strpos() can return 0 if the needle is at the very beginning (position 0) of the haystack. Also, removing htmlentities() will make your code run a lot faster. All that htmlentities() does is replace certain characters with their appropriate HTML equivalent. For instance, it replaces every & with &
As you can imagine, checking every character in a string individually and replacing many of them takes extra memory and processor power. Not only that, but it's unnecessary if you plan on just doing a text comparison. For instance, compare the following statements:
strpos('Billy & Sally', '&'); // 6
strpos('Billy & Sally', '&'); // 6
strpos('Billy & Sally', 'S'); // 8
strpos('Billy & Sally', 'S') // 12
Or, in the worst case, you may even cause something true to evaluate to false.
strpos('<img src...', '<'); // 0
strpos('<img src...','<'); // FALSE
In order to circumvent this you'd end up using even more HTML entities.
strpos('<img src...', '<'); // 0
But this, as you can imagine, is not only annoying to code but gets redundant. You're better off excluding HTML entities entirely. Usually HTML entities is only used when you're outputting text. Not comparing.
strpos is likely to be faster than preg_match and the alternatives in this case, the best idea would be to do some benchmarks of your own with real example data and see what is best for your needs, although that may be overdoing it. Don't worry too much about performance until it starts to become a problem