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# strpos

(PHP 3, PHP 4 , PHP 5)

strpos -- Find position of first occurrence of a string

## Description

int strpos ( string haystack, string needle [, int offset])

Returns the numeric position of the first occurrence of `needle` in the `haystack` string. Unlike the strrpos(), this function can take a full string as the `needle` parameter and the entire string will be used.

If `needle` is not found, strpos() will return boolean `FALSE`.

Warning
This function may return Boolean `FALSE`, but may also return a non-Boolean value which evaluates to `FALSE`, such as `0` or "". Please read the section on Booleans for more information. Use the === operator for testing the return value of this function.

Example 1. strpos() examples
`<?php $mystring = 'abc'; $findme = 'a'; $pos = strpos($mystring, $findme); // Note our use of ===. Simply == would not work as expected // because the position of 'a' was the 0th (first) character. if ($pos === false) { echo "The string '$findme' was not found in the string '$mystring'"; } else { echo "The string '$findme' was found in the string '$mystring'"; echo " and exists at position $pos"; } // We can search for the character, ignoring anything before the offset $newstring = 'abcdef abcdef'; $pos = strpos($newstring, 'a', 1); // $pos = 7, not 0 ?>`

If `needle` is not a string, it is converted to an integer and applied as the ordinal value of a character.

The optional `offset` parameter allows you to specify which character in `haystack` to start searching. The position returned is still relative to the the beginning of `haystack`.

See also strrpos(), stripos(), strripos(), strrchr(), substr(), stristr(), and strstr().

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