# strpos

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

strpos — Find position of first occurrence of a string

### Description

int strpos ( string `$haystack` , mixed `$needle` [, int `$offset` ] )

Returns the numeric position of the first occurrence of `needle` in the `haystack` string. Unlike the strrpos() before PHP 5, this function can take a full string as the `needle` parameter and the entire string will be used.

### Parameters

`haystack`

`needle`

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

`offset`

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

### Return Values

Returns the position as an integer. 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.

### Examples

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
?>`

### Notes

> Note: This function is binary-safe.

### See Also

- strrpos()
- stripos()
- strripos()
- strrchr()
- substr()
- stristr()
- strstr()