CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpstrpos
DerekConlon
DerekConlon

Reputation: 463

Why is strpos('L', 'L') === true evaluating to false?

I am having problems with strpos evaluating properly.

$status = "L";
$x = strpos($status,'L');
echo var_export($x,true);
echo "<br/>";
if (strpos($status,'L') === true) {echo "L is there!.";}
else {echo "No L Found!";}

This outputs:

0
No L Found!

With how I understand strpos and the "===" vs the "==" this should be finding the L.

What do I not understand?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 180

Answers (2)

Don&#39;t Panic
Don&#39;t Panic

Reputation: 41810

You do need to perform a strict comparison. You just need to do the opposite one.

if (strpos($status, 'L') !== false) {
    echo "L is there!.";
} else {
    echo "No L Found!";
}

When evaluated with === true, strpos($status,'L') would have to return a literal boolean true, not just a value that evaluates to true, and as you can see in the documentation, strpos will never return that.

If you used == true instead, it would work sometimes, only when L was not the first character in the string. When it is the first character, strpos($status,'L') will return 0, which does not evaluate to true, but any other position in the string would return a positive integer, which does.

Since false is the value the function returns if the search string is not found, the only reliable way to do this is to do strict comparison against false.

Upvotes: 0

DannyM
DannyM

Reputation: 743

strpos doesn't return true, it returns false if the string isn't found or the index if it is found.

From the official docs:

Returns the position of where the needle exists relative to the beginning of the haystack string (independent of offset). Also note that string positions start at 0, and not 1.

Returns FALSE if the needle was not found.

Upvotes: 4

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