How to find a string in an array in PHP?

Question

I have an array:

$array = array(\"apple\", \"banana\", \"cap\", \"dog\", etc..) up to 80 values.

and a string variable:

$st         


        

Answer 1

If you just need an exact match, use in_array($str, $array) - it will be faster.

Another approach would be to use an associative array with your strings as the key, which should be logarithmically faster. Doubt you'll see a huge difference between that and the linear search approach with just 80 elements though.

If you do need a pattern match, then you'll need to loop over the array elements to use preg_match.

---

You edited the question to ask "what if you want to check for several strings?" - you'll need to loop over those strings, but you can stop as soon as you don't get a match...

$find=array("foo", "bar");
$found=count($find)>0; //ensure found is initialised as false when no terms
foreach($find as $term)
{
   if(!in_array($term, $array))
   {
        $found=false;
        break;
   }
}