Find whole word with strpos()

Question

Hello people :) I'm trying to use strpos() to find whole words in a sentence. But at the moment, it also find the word if it just are a part of another word. For example:

$mystring = "It's a beautiful morning today!";
$findme   = "a";

$pos = strpos($mystring, $findme);

In this example it would find "a" in the word "a" (as it should do), but also in "beautiful" because there is an a in it.

How can i find only whole words and not if it is a part of other words?

There' sdefinitely better methods to do this than using strpos(), so why the restriction? — Mark Baker, Feb 02 '11 at 21:04

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 02 '11 at 21:03

13

This is a job for regex:

$regex = '/\b'.$word.'\b/';

Basically, it's finding the letters surrounded by a word-boundary (the \b bits). So, to find the position:

preg_match($regex, $string, $match, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
$pos = $match[0][1];

answered Feb 02 '11 at 21:03

ircmaxell

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And if you're not sure where the word ends?. In my case it's a youtube url that might have a random query string attached to it, i just need the position of the beginning and the end of it. – Marcos Di Paolo Jan 03 '20 at 03:02

Xavier Barbosa · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-02T21:17:19.707

3

Use regex , with the word boundary delimiter \b, like this :

$mystring = "It's a beautiful morning today!";
preg_match_all('/\ba\b/', $mystring, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
var_dump($matches);

returns

array(1) {
  [0]=>
  array(1) {
    [0]=>
    array(2) {
      [0]=>
      string(1) "a"
      [1]=>
      int(5)
    }
  }
}

edited Feb 02 '11 at 21:17

answered Feb 02 '11 at 21:10

Xavier Barbosa

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Hey Xavier. I couldn't get this solution working. Have you other solutions? – Simon Thomsen Feb 02 '11 at 21:15
I found out! If i just put space around the word, it done the work. Thanks for your time! ;) – Simon Thomsen Feb 02 '11 at 21:17
1

Putting space around it doesn't detect it if its the first or last word of string. – AbiusX Jan 14 '14 at 01:43

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 02 '11 at 21:09

0

regex is hard for beginners, another way and I admit it isn't the best, would be to use
$findme = " a "

answered Feb 02 '11 at 21:09

Steve

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I found out! If i just put space around the word, it done the work. Thanks for your time! ;) – Simon Thomsen Feb 02 '11 at 21:18
1

That answer is wrong. It won't find word if it's the first or the last one. – ElChupacabra Jan 01 '18 at 19:57
@ElChupacabra "...and I admit it isn't the best" – Steve Jan 01 '18 at 22:48

Find whole word with strpos()

3 Answers3