How to check if a string contains specific words in PHP

There are multiple ways to check if a string contains any words from the given array using PHP. You can check one specific word or multiple words from an array.

Check if a string contains a specific word:
Use the PHP str_contains() function to determine if a string contains a specific word.

<?php 

$string = 'Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry area.'; 
$word = 'dummy'; 

// Case sensitive 
if (str_contains($string, $word)) { 
    echo "String contains '$word'"; 
} else { 
    echo "String does not contains '$word'"; 
} 

// Case insensitive 
if (stripos($string, $word) !== false) { 
    echo "String contains '$word'"; 
} else { 
    echo "String does not contains '$word'"; 
} 

?>

php

Check if a string contains multiple specific words:
If you want to check multiple words in a string, define words in an array. The following code snippets can help to check whether a string contains any words from the given array using PHP.

<?php 

$string = "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry area."; 
$words = ["ipsum", "text", "area"]; 

// Using str_contains (PHP 8+) 
foreach ($words as $word) { 
    if (str_contains($string, $word)) { 
        echo "String contains '$word'\n"; 
    } 
} 

// Using stripos (case-insensitive) 
foreach ($words as $word) { 
    if (stripos($string, $word) !== false) { 
        echo "String contains '$word'\n"; 
    } 
} 

// Using preg_match (case-insensitive) 
$pattern = '/\b(' . implode('|', array_map('preg_quote', $words)) . ')\b/i'; 
if (preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches)) { 
    echo "String contains a word from the array: " . implode(", ", array_unique($matches)) . "\n"; 
} 

?>

Custom function to check if a string contains specific words from an array and return a boolean value (true/false) using PHP:

function stringContainsWords(string $string, array $words): bool 
{ 
    foreach ($words as $word) { 
        if (stripos($string, $word) !== false) { 
            return true; // If any word is found, return true immediately 
        } 
    } 
    return false; // Words were not found 
}