Check if website is in the blocked list - php

Question

Am creating a class that handles redirection to exterior locations. I created a method called isBlocked which returns a boolean result. This function works as follows:
It loops through the $_blocked variable and compares is the input string is found, it it is it returns true otherwise false. Bellow is the actual incase my explanation is not enough.
public static function isBlocked($location)
{
for($i = 0; $i < sizeof(self::$_blocked); $i++)
{
if(self::$_blocked[$i] === $location)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
}
This works perfectly, the problem comes when for example, lets say "google.com" is on the list and the input is "www.google.com", it will return false. This is obvious since am using the identical operator ===.
Question is the following: Is there any function in PHP that work with URLS apart from url_encode & url_decode? I obviously can create a regular expression but let me know if there is any other approach to this.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It occurs to me that the match is backwards, since it's a many to one, with the one matching a (sub)part of any in the stack. So, in that case we can use a strpos() (in lieu of a regular expression):
function find_reverse_match($needle, $haystack) {
$i = 0;
$c = count($haystack);
while ($i < $c) {
if (strpos($needle, $haystack[$i++]) !== false) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
http://codepad.viper-7.com/69ot4O

Answer 2

There is no php function to replace only first occurrence in a string, so preg_replace() and in_array() will do the job:
$blocked = array(
'www.google.com',
'yahoo.com'
);
var_dump( in_array( preg_replace( '/^www\./', '', 'google.com' ), preg_replace( '/^www\./', '', $blocked ) ) ); // true
var_dump( in_array( preg_replace( '/^www\./', '', 'www.yahoo.com' ), preg_replace( '/^www\./', '', $blocked ) ) ); // true
var_dump( in_array( preg_replace( '/^www\./', '', 'www.facebook.com' ), preg_replace( '/^www\./', '', $blocked ) ) ); // false

Answer 3

i just take example:
Php Search_Array using Wildcard
that wrote #JaredFarrish and adopt for this particular case:
<?php
function isBlocked($location)
{
$blocked = [
'google.com',
'www.google.com',
'play.google.com',
'developers.google.com',
];
$matches = preg_grep("/^(www)?$location$/", $blocked);
if (empty($matches)) {
return false;
} else {
return true;
}
}
print isBlocked('play.google.com'); // 1
print isBlocked('www.google.com'); // 1
print isBlocked('google.com'); // 1
print isBlocked('stackoverflow.com'); // 0
And the answer: you should write regular expression)

Answer 4

Is it possible for you to string replace the www.?
public static function isBlocked($location)
{
for($i = 0; $i < sizeof(self::$_blocked); $i++)
{
if(self::$_blocked[$i] === str_replace("www.","",$location))
{
return true;
}
return false;
}
}
Psuedo code.
NVM. Seem you said you can do expression
Maybe use
parse_url
http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php