CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phparrays
john
john

Reputation: 1273

php how to search for multiple elements in an array

For a flatfile blog system, i store all the data in a .txt file. On line 7 of the txt file , there are tags stored, comma separated like below:

id_12345678     // 1st line; id line
club            // 2nd line; category line
...
sport,athletics // 7th line; tag line

To grab all the files which have a specific tag, e.g sport and find the corresponding file in which that tag is founded, i use this code:

$search_tag = 'sport'; 
$blogfiles = glob($dir.'/*.txt'); // read all the blogfiles
$tag_matches = array();

foreach($blogfiles as $file) { // Loop through all the blogfiles
        $lines = file($file, FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES); // file into an array
        $buffer = $lines[7]; // the tag line

        if(strpos(strtolower($buffer), $search_tag) !== FALSE) { // strtolower; tag word not case sensitive                                         
                $tag_matches[] = $file; // array of files which have the specific tag inside                                                            
        }
    }

This works fine! $tag_matches gives me an array of files which contain the tag sport.

Now i want to search on multiple tags, per example sport,athletics. What i need to achieve now is an array of all the files which contain at least one of these tags.

So i tried:

$search_tag = array('sport','athletics'); 
...
if(strpos(strtolower($buffer), $search_tag) !== FALSE) { // $search_tag as array of multiple tags  does not work anymore ???                                        
                $tag_matches[] = $file; // array of files which have the specific tag inside                                                            
        }

How do i have to do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 50

Answers (1)

Sammitch
Sammitch

Reputation: 32262

Your current solution will match anything where the search string is even a portion of a tag. Eg: Do a tag search for e and you'll match just about every article.

Split the tags properly and do full matching:

$buffer = 'foo,bar,baz';
$tags = explode(',', $buffer);

$search_tags = ['bonk', 'bar'];

$tag_matches = [];
foreach($search_tags as $tag) {
    if( in_array($tag, $search_tags) ) {
        $tag_matches[] = 'yes'; // article id here
        break; // you only need one match
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions