Find part of a string and output the whole string - php

Question

I would like to find part of a string and if true I want to ouput the whole of the string that it finds.
Below is an example:
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$Find = "Eccle";
if(strstr($Find, $Towns)){
echo outputWholeString($Find, $Towns); // Result: Eccleston.
}
If anyone can shed some light on how to do this as well, and bare in mind that it will not be static values; the $Towns and $Find variables will be dynamically assigned on my live script.

Answer 1

Use explode() and strpos() as
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$data=explode(",",$Towns);//
$Find = "Eccle";
foreach ($data as $town)
if (strpos($town, $Find) !== false) {
echo $town;
}
DEMO

Answer 2

You have to use strpos() to search for a string inside another one:
if( strpos($Towns, $Find) === false ) {
echo $Towns;
}
Note that you have to use "===" to know if strpos() returned false or 0.

Answer 3

The solution using preg_match function:
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$Find = "Eccle";
preg_match("/\b\w*?$Find\w*?\b/", $Towns, $match);
$result = (!empty($match))? $match[0] : "";
print_r($result); // "Eccleston"

Answer 4

Assuming that you will always have $Towns separated by ", " then you could do something like this
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$Find = "Eccle";
$TownsArray = explode(", ", $Towns);
foreach($TownsArray as $Town)
{
if(stristr($Find, $Town))
{
echo $Town; break;
}
}
The above code will output the Town once it finds the needle and exit the foreach loop. You could remove the "break;" to continue letting the script run to see if it finds more results.

Answer 5

Using preg_match(), it is possible to search for Eccle and return the Eccleston word.
I use the Pearl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) '#\w*' . $Find . '\w*#' in the code below and the demo code.
The # characters are PCRE delimiters. The pattern searched is inside these delimiters. Some people prefer / as delimiter.
The \w indicates word characters.
The * indicates 0 or more repetions of the previous character.
So, the #\w*Eccle\w*# PCRE searches for an string containing Eccle surrounded by one or more word characters (letters)
<?php
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$Find = "Eccle";
if (preg_match('#\w*' . $Find . '\w*#', $Towns, $matches)) {
print_r($matches[0]);
}
?>
Running code: http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/code/4e4026cbbd93deaf8fef0365a7bc6cf6eacc2014
Note: '#\w*' . $Find . '\w*#' is the same as "#\w*$Find\w*#" (note the surrounding single or double quotes). See this.

Answer 6

You were nearly there...
This is probably what you are looking for:
<?php
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$Find = "Eccle";
if(stripos($Towns, $Find)) {
echo $Towns;
}
The output is: Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow which is what I would call "the whole string".
If however you only want to output that partly matched part of "the whole string", then take a look at that example:
<?php
$Towns = "Eccleston, Aberdeen, Glasgow";
$Find = "Eccle";
foreach (explode(',', $Towns) as $Town) {
if(stripos($Town, $Find)) {
echo trim($Town);
}
}
The output of that obviously is: Eccleston...
Two general remarks:
the strpos() / stripos() functions are better suited here, since they return only a position instead of the whole matched string which is enough for the given purpose.
the usage of stripos() instead of strpos() performs a case insensitive search, which probably makes sense for the task...