How to Find the Second Occurrence of a String Using strpos

Finding the Second Occurrence of a String Using strpos

The strpos function in PHP is commonly used to find the position of the first occurrence of a substring within a string. However, there may be instances where you need to retrieve the second or subsequent occurrences.

Recursing with strpos

To find the second occurrence of a substring, one approach is to use recursion and leverage the existing functionality of strpos. This can be achieved by invoking strpos repeatedly, passing the index of the previous occurrence as the starting position for the next search:

<code class="php"><?php

/**
 * Find the position of the Xth occurrence of a substring in a string
 *
 * @param string $haystack The input haystack string
 * @param string $needle The substring to search for
 * @param int $number The occurrence number to find
 * @return int|bool The index of the Xth occurrence or false if not found
 */
function strposX($haystack, $needle, $number) {
    // Handle the base case (finding the first occurrence)
    if ($number == 1) {
        return strpos($haystack, $needle);
    } 
    // Recursively search for the Nth occurrence (N > 1)
    elseif ($number > 1) {
        $previousOccurrence = strposX($haystack, $needle, $number - 1);
        // If the previous occurrence is found, continue searching from there
        if ($previousOccurrence !== false) {
            return strpos($haystack, $needle, $previousOccurrence + strlen($needle));
        }
    } 
    // If the conditions are not met, return an error or false
    return false;
}

// Example usage
$haystack = 'This is a test string.';
$needle = 'is';
$secondOccurrence = strposX($haystack, $needle, 2);

if ($secondOccurrence !== false) {
    echo 'The second occurrence of "' . $needle . '" is at index ' . $secondOccurrence . ' in "' . $haystack . '".';
} else {
    echo 'The second occurrence of "' . $needle . '" was not found.';
}</code>

This approach leverages recursion to iteratively find subsequent occurrences of the substring until the desired occurrence is found or the end of the string is reached.

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