PHP Is Array Item In Variable

Question

I have an array and a variable, I want to check if any of the array items occur in the variable. I presume I somehow use strstr()?

Example:

$bad = array('google.com', 'facebook.com', 'myspace.com');
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if(ANY OF $bad IS IN $ref) {
 ...        
}

Answer 1

You should use strpos if you only want to determine if the variable exists, but you don't need to return part of the string.

Answer 2

If you need substring matching for your referers (e.g., match 'three' in '...three...'):

$array = array('one', 'two', 'three', ...);
$val = '...three...';
foreach ($array as $entry) {
    if (strpos($val, $entry) !== false) {
        print 'Look ma, I found it!';
    }
}

If not (i.e., you are looking for exact matches), you can just;

$array = array('one', 'two', 'three', ...);
$needle = 'three';
if (in_array($needle, $array)) {
    print 'Look ma, I found it!';
}

---

Edited according to @pinkgothic's (correct) comment.

Answer 3

foreach ($array as $value) {
    if (strpos($variable, $value) !== false) {
        // yep, this array element exists in your variable, do what you want here
    }
}

(strpos() is a better choice than strstr(), it's less resource-heavy.)

Answer 4

You could do it like this, but it is a bit of a cheat. str_ireplace() will take an array of search values, and also will tell you how many replacements it did, so if it did any replacements you know you have a match.

<?php

$bad = array('google.com', 'facebook.com', 'myspace.com');
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

str_ireplace($bad, '', $ref, $count);

if ($count > 0) {
    die ('bad');   
}