JavaScript search() method

Part of JavaScript's String object, the search method() takes a regular expression pattern as argument, and returns the character position index of the first match it found: var str = "I learn JavaScript"; // Add "i" modifier to make search case-insensitive: alert( str.search( /javascript/i ) ); // 8
search() returns -1 if no match is found, just like indexOf(): in fact, search() is like the "regular expression" version of that method. It even accepts a string as argument, and automatically converts it to a pattern: (you lose a lot power by just using this method for plain text searches!) var str = "I learn JavaScript"; alert( str.search("PHP") ); // -1, not found alert( str.search("JavaScript") ); // 8 alert( str.search("javascript") ); // -1, letter-casing mismatch
Tip: you can also perform case-insensitive searches with search() with string argument or indexOf() by first converting the "searched" string toLowerCase() or toUpperCase().
The closest PHP equivalent to JavaScript's search() method is the preg_match() function. The difference is that unlike search(), it does not return the match's character position index: $str = 'I learn PHP'; $found = preg_match( '/php/i' , $str ); // case-insensitive search if( $found == 1 ) // Returns 1 if matched echo 'You *are* learning PHP!';
Sister method: replace() substitutes RegExp pattern matches in one string with another string.

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