PHP Search string, split to array?

Question

I need to search a string for usernames separated by a comma. Have to consider the string might be empty, upper or lowercase, or might contain spaces before or after commas too. It could be:

$string = "Chris, Tom,Jeff,Roger"
$string = "Chris,Tom , Jeff ,Roger"
$string = ",,,,Chris,tom,Jeff,Roger,,,,"
etc...

Say I need to see if "Tom" is in $string . Am I best to use explode to split the string into an array, trimming then checking each entry? Or is there a better way?

Answer 1

There are several ways to do it. This is perfectly fine and accurate:

$found = in_array('Tom', array_filter(explode(',', $string)));

Case insensitive:

$found = in_array('tom', array_filter(explode(',', strtolower($string))));

Answer 2

You can check it manually.

public function splitNames() {
    $string = ",,,,Chris,tom,Jeff,Roger,,,,";
    $splited = explode(",", $string);
    foreach ($splited as $name) {
        if ($name == null || $name == "") {
            continue;
        } else {
            $names[] = ucfirst(strtolower(trim($name)));
        }
    }

    return $names;
}

Answer 3

Using preg_match with the i modifier you can verify whether your string contains your data in a case insensitive manner:

function contains($value, $string) {
    return preg_match('/(?<=[[:punct:]|[:space:]])(' . $value . ')(?=[[:punct:]|[:space:]])/i', $string, $match);
}