HowTo: PHP Compare Two Text Strings

Posted on in Categories last updated November 6, 2012

How can I compare two strings using php? How do I use php to compare two strings?


PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. It is an open source project. PHP also offers built-in database integration for several commercial and non-commercial database management systems, so writing a database-enabled webpage with PHP is fairly simple.

By default PHP is installed on Unix like operating system. The syntax is as follows to compare two strings using php:

<?php
$string1 = "Foo";
$string2 = "Bar";
if ( $string1 == $string2 ){
  echo "Equal: Yes\n";
}
else{
  echo "Equal: No\n";
}
?>

PHP version 4 and 5 comes with a new function called strcmp(). It is a binary safe string comparison function. The syntax is:

int strcmp ($string1, $string2);

The function returns the following values:

  1. Returns < 0 if string1 is less than string2.
  2. Returns > 0 if string1 is greater than string2.
  3. Returns 0 if they are equal.

Example

<?php
$string1 = "Foo";
$string2 = "Bar";
if ( strcmp ( $string1, $string2) == 0  ){
  echo "Equal: Yes\n";
}
else{
  echo "Equal: No\n";
}
?>

Another simple example:

 $type=$what;
 $catoutput="NULL";
 foreach( $cats as $key=>$values ){
  $mycat=$values[0];  
  $myimg=$values[1];  
  $mydesc=$values[2]; 
  if ( $key == $type ) {
    $catoutput = 'Plan: '. $mycat;
    $catoutput .= 'Image: ' . $myimg;
    $catoutput .= 'Description: ' . $mydesc;
    return $catoutput;
  }
}

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. He has worked with global clients and in various industries, including IT, education, defense and space research, and the nonprofit sector. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+.

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