Find whole word with strpos()

php strpos
Simon Thomsen picture Simon Thomsen · Feb 2, 2011 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

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?

Answer

ircmaxell picture ircmaxell · Feb 2, 2011

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];

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