Re: Fastest way to find out if a string contains a certain character?

On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 11:35 +0200, Peter Lind wrote: > On 27 July 2010 11:27, Ashley Sheridan <ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote: > > On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 09:30 +0200, Gary wrote: > > > >> I know there are a number of possible ways of doing this, but I was just > >> wondering if there is an accepted way of doing so which is better > >> than others, performance wise. An idiom, if you like. > >> > >> > > > > > > If you only need to find if a string contains the character and not its > > position, then strstr() (or strchr(), but according to the manual they > > are both the same) is the fastest route to go down. Using strpos() is > > slower because it has to return the actual position of what you were > > looking for, and a regex will be the slowest of all (and one would have > > to question the sanity of someone using a regex to find a single > > character in a string!) > > > > I doubt there will be a noticeable difference between strstr and > strpos - returning a bool is not faster than returning an integer. > Would have to check the actual php source to see how the two are > implemented to see if there's any real difference that might make a > difference in speed. > > Regards > Peter > I tell a lie! Just checked the manual and strpos() is indeed the faster than strstr(). I vaguely remembered it was one of the two, but had not had quite enough coffee at this point of the morning obviously! Having said that, I agree with Peter. There's unlikely to be a noticeable difference unless working with thousands of iterations in a loop using this function call. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk