strpos($needle,$hey_stack);  returns the exact the position of the the needle in the heystack.

The powerful/easy-to-use if(strpos(‘hey’,’hey world’)){//do something}else{//do something else} feature of PHP is also a major weakness if you do not fully understand how if statements in PHP work.

This comes back to a basic programming concept of beginning counting from zero. In the case of strpos(‘hey’,’hey world’) the result is zero.

PHP if statements evaluate the following as false:

• false
• 0
• NULL
• '' (an empty string)

As strpos(‘hey’,’hey world’); returns zero as ‘hey’ is at string position 0 a simple if statement in PHP would return false.

The correct way is to capture for a real false:

if (strpos('hey', 'hey world')!== false)
{
     //do something
}
else
{
    //do something else
}