Resolved Why is this conditional statement not evaluating like I expect it too?

[BMAN99]

Hey guys,

I'm a bit stumped on this one. I would have expected the following code to echo "string contains either 123 or abc". But it doesn't! Any idea why?

PHP Code:

<?php

$string = "123 abc";

$needle = strpos($string, "123");
$needle2 = strpos($string, "def");

    if (($needle === true) || ($needle2 === true)) {
        echo "string contains either 123 or abc";
    } else {
        echo "string does NOT contain either 123 or abc";
    }

?>

Am I doing something wrong? Or is there a better way to check whether a string contains either of two specific substrings?

[tracknut]

If it finds the string, strpos returns the position of the string, not "true". So you could test != false, but I don't think it will ever return "true".

    if (strpos($string, "123") || strpos($string, "def")) {
...

Dave

[Inigoesdr]

tracknut is mostly correct. strpos() won't ever return an explicit TRUE. It will be FALSE or a number. So, your conditions should look more like this:

PHP Code:

$needle = strpos($string, "123"); 
$needle2 = strpos($string, "def"); 

    if ($needle !== false || $needle2 !== false) { 
        echo "string contains either 123 or abc"; 
    } else { 
        echo "string does NOT contain either 123 or abc"; 
    } 


You want to test for explicit, "!==", not false because with PHP's loose type conversion if the substring position is 0(at the beginning of the string) it will evaluate to false with "!=" and your result will be incorrect.

[BMAN99]

Thanks guys! That makes sense.