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Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:32:28 -0700
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To: Lars Strojny <lstrojny@php.net>
CC: Martin Jansen <martin@divbyzero.net>, internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] New string functions: str_startswith() and	str_endswith()
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

For the start of the string:

   substr($haystack,0,strlen($needle)) == $needle

And for the end of the string:

   substr($haystack,-strlen($needle)) == $needle

For case-insensitivity, just strtolower both.

Writing built-in functions for something that can be done with trivial 
one-liners isn't something we typically do.

-Rasmus

Lars Strojny wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> first of all, thanks for you work! A few comments below.
>
> Am Samstag, den 19.07.2008, 14:55 +0200 schrieb Martin Jansen:
>> Attached you'll find a patch against PHP_5_3 that implements two new
>> string functions:
>>
>> str_startswith(haystack, needle [, case_sensitivity])
>
> That's in my opinion too easy to solve with strpos($haystack, $needle)
> === 0.
>
>> checks if haystack starts with needle. The check is performed
>> case-insensitively, but this can be overridden by passing TRUE as the
>> value for the third parameter. The second function
>>
>> str_endswith(haystack, needle [, case_sensitivity])
> [...]
>
> Suffix checking is indeed a bit harder. But I'm not sure if we should
> introduce a function for every special case. Suffix verification often
> is about verifying file extensions. That could be easily solved with
> pathinfo() (and to make that easier, it would be more helpful to allow
> the engine to directly access returned arrays like
> pathinfo($file)['extension']). The other thing I would love to see is
> something I really love in Ruby: you have various ways to work with
> substrings[1]. For example you can do "foobar"[-3,3] == "bar" to check
> the suffix. That's in my opinion much easier and flexible.
>
> So -1 from me for the new string functions, but +1 for niftier variants
> to work with offsets.
>
> [1] ﻿http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_ruby/strings.html
>
> cu, Lars