search for partial or complete text in array - php

Question

I have an HTML search form:
<form method="post">
<input type="text" name="term" />
<br />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>
I then have a foreach loop to check if the array item contains the search term:
<?php if (is_array($data['page'])): ?>
<?php foreach ($data['page'] as $item): ?>
<?php foreach($item as $item_member): ?>
<?php if(strpos($item_member, $_POST['term']) !== FALSE): ?>
<tr>
<?php foreach ($columns as $key => $column): ?>
<?php $key = parse_class($key); ?>
<td class="<?php echo $key['class']; ?>"><a class="cell-link"
href="<?php echo $details_link . $item[$details_id_field]; ?>">
<?php echo (!empty($item[$key['column']])) ? $item[$key['column']] : ' '; ?>
</a></td>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
Here is a more readable version
if(is_array($data['page'])){
foreach($data['page'] as $item){
if(array_search($_POST['term'], $item)){
echo "<tr>";
foreach($columns as $key => $column){
$key = parse_class($key);
echo '<td class="' . $key['class'] . '"><a class="cell-link" href="' . $details_link . $item[$details_id_field] . '">';
echo (!empty($item[$key['column']])) ? $item[$key['column']] : ' ';
echo '</a></td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
}
}
}
At the moment, the search only works if the search term is exactly the same as the name in the item.
The array item contains the following information:
234|test|21|Jul 28, 2013|0%|1375026328|1375026328|Test)/
I'm really only interested in matching the second value in item (in the example above "test" with the search term "term"
I have tried in_array, strpos with no luck.
For the example above, at the moment a result is only brought up if I enter the exact text "test" in the search form. If I enter "tes" for example which is an incomplete search phrase, nothing shows.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly $item holds the array you referred to.
Add another foreach to iterate the elements of $item and for every one of the items preform a strpos($item_member, $_POST['term']) check instead of array_search:
<?php foreach($item as $item_member)): ?>
<?php if(strpos($item_member, $_POST['term']) !== FALSE): ?>
<?php // here do what you gotta do ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
BUT, if you already know that you're looking to match only the second element - you can skip this foreach and simply do:
<?php if(strpos($item[1], $_POST['term']) !== FALSE): ?>
This check will return true (or actually the beginning index of the match that was found) for any valid sub-string of test - so if you want only sub-string that start at index 0 you can change the test instead of: !== FALSE
to
=== 0
By the way - the : syntax is hard to read - I would change it.

Answer 2

First of all, I don't know what you intend 234|test|21|Jul 28, 2013|0%|1375026328|1375026328|Test)/ to mean. Is that a string at the 0 index of the array? Are the pipes just a way to visually separate the array elements?
Also, your code is also very hard to read, so I didn't read it. That said, I think I understand what you're trying to do. Let's say you have an array with some stuff in it:
$arr = array(
234,
'test',
'Jul 28, 2013',
'testers',
);
And let's say you have a user input string:
$input = 'tes';
We want to determine if any of the elements in the array contain this string:
$matches = array();
foreach($arr as $element) {
if (strpos("$element", $input) !== false) {
#match found, store it
$matches[] = $element;
}
}
var_dump($matches); //contains two elements, 'test', and 'testers'
Output of that var_dump:
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(4) "test"
[1]=>
string(7) "testers"
}
You should be able to adapt this to your specific use case. By the way, the quotes around $element in that strpos call are to cast it to a string. I doubt this is necessary in PHP (can't recall), but just in case ...