Search for a string or part of string in PHP

Question

I am doing a very small online store application in PHP. So I have an array of maps in PHP. I want to search for a string (a product) in the array. I looked at array_search in PHP and it seems that it only looks for exact match. Do you guys know a better way to do this functionality? Since this is a very small part of what I am actually doing, I was hoping that there was something built in. Any ideas?

Thanks!

EDIT: The array contains "products" in this format:

[6] => SimpleXMLElement Object
    (
        [@attributes] => Array
            (
                [id] => 2000-YM
            )

        [Name] => Team Swim School T-Shirt
        [size] => YM
        [price] => 15
        [group] => Team Clothing
        [id] => 2000-YM
    )

[7] => SimpleXMLElement Object
    (
        [@attributes] => Array
            (
                [id] => 3000-YS
            )

        [Name] => Youth Track Jacket
        [size] => YS
        [price] => 55
        [group] => Team Clothing
        [id] => 3000-YS
    )

So I was wondering I can do a search such as "Team" and it would return me first item seen here. I am basing the search on the Name (again this is just something small). I understand that I can find the exact string, I am just stuck on the "best results" if it cannot find the exact item. Efficiency is nice but not required since I only have about 50 items so even if I use a "slow" algorithm it won't take much time.

Answer 1

array_filter lets you specify a custom function to do the searching. In your case, a simple function that uses strpos() to check if your search string is present:

function my_search($haystack) {
    $needle = 'value to search for';
    return(strpos($haystack, $needle)); // or stripos() if you want case-insensitive searching.
}

$matches = array_filter($your_array, 'my_search');

Alternatively, you could use an anonymous function to help prevent namespace contamination:

$matches = array_filter($your_array, function ($haystack) use ($needle) {
    return(strpos($haystack, $needle));
});