Find the first match for a string in text and return sample of original text

Question

I have a text that includes all sort of special chars and I need to find the first match for a string and then return something like this 10 chars + first match + 10 chars. In other words a sample of the text where the first match is around the middle.

Example:

$text = "+!This is a text with some % special chars/text and ( for a string query to match. Then !! mor&&&e and so on...chars/text.";
$stringToFind = "hars/t";

It should return:

$grabtext = "% special chars/text and ( for";

I made the example of a string to find that is not a complete word and has 1 special char.

Answer 1

From the PHP manual

strpos — Find the position of the first occurrence of a substring in a string

So if we use that function to locate the offset of the substring we can easily use something like substr to obtain a substring of 10 characters +/- from that offset.

function grabText($string, $searchString) {
    if (($x = strpos($string, $searchString)) === false) {
        return; // no match found
    }
    $y = strlen($searchString) + 20;
    $x = max(0, $x - 10);
    return substr($string, $x, $y);
}

$text = "+!This is a text with some % special chars/text and ( for a string query to match. Then !! mor&&&e and so on...chars/text.";
$stringToFind = "hars/t";
echo grabText($text, $stringToFind); //  special chars/text and (