Hi, I’m Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 46. Today I’m talking with Phillipp Tanlak, about an RFC that he’s made titled str_contains. Phillipp, would you please introduce yourself.

Hey, Derick. My name is Philipp. I’m 25 years old and I live in Germany. I work for an IT service company, which does mainly development and maintenance of IT projects. We specialise in the maintenance of e-commerce website and create enterprise applications.

How long have you been using PHP for?

I’ve been using PHP for quite a long time now that might be six years I guess.

What brought to you creating an RFC?

The main reason I’ve created this RFC was out of necessity and interest, mainly to scratch my own itch.

That is how most things make it into PHP in the end isn’t it?

Yeah, I guess.

The RFC is titled str_contains, that tells me something that is about strings and containing things. How do we currently find a string in a string?

The current approach to find the string in a string is to use the strpos() function or the strstr() function. But on Reddit, I found someone also use preg_match which I find kind of interesting.

There are multiple amount of different methods in use, what are the general problems with these approaches that people have made?

So the current approach which I find is not very intuitive, and mainly because of the return values of these functions. For example, the strpos() returns either the position where the string is found, or a false value if the string is not found, but there has to be a check with a !== operation, and the strstr() function just returns a string. So you have to convert that to a boolean to check if the string is found or not.

Because with strpos(), if you wouldn’t use the === or !== operator. Of course, if it would find it at the first position of the string, it’d be zero position, and it would return false, even though it’s sfound it.

Yeah.

So there’s a few different problems with these things. Also, I don’t think it’s particularly vary intuitive to do because you sort of need to come up with like a whole construct to see whether it’s part of a string.

Correct. I don’t think it’s intuitive for a beginner. So if someone is learning PHP for