jQuery or JavaScript equivalent of PHP strpos function to find string on a page

Question

Is there an equivalent function in JavaScript or jQuery similar to strpos in PHP?

I want to locate a string inside an element on a page. The string I\'m

Answer 1

You don't need jquery for this -- plain old Javascript will do just fine, using the .indexof() method.

However if you really want an exact syntax match for PHP's strpos(), something like this would do it:

function strpos (haystack, needle, offset) {
  var i = (haystack+'').indexOf(needle, (offset || 0));
  return i === -1 ? false : i;
}

Note: This function taken from here: http://phpjs.org/functions/strpos:545

JSFiddle

Answer 2

I assume you mean check whether a string contains a character, and the position in the string - you'd like to use the indexOf() method of a string in JS. Here are the relevant docs.

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Okay, so you'd like to search the whole page! The :contains() selector will do that. See the jQuery docs for :contains.

To search every element in the page, use

var has_string = $('*:contains("search text")');

If you get jQuery elements back, then the search was a success. For example, on this very page

var has_string=$('*:contains("Alex JL")').length
//has_string is 18
var has_string=$('*:contains("horsey rodeo")').length
//has_string if 0. So, you could an `if` on this and it would work as expected.