Binary safe string comparison

strcmp

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

strcmp — Binary safe string comparison

Description

strcmp(string $string1, string $string2): int

Note that this comparison is case sensitive.

Parameters

string1

The first string.

string2

The second string.

Return Values

Returns a value less than 0 if string1 is less than string2; a value greater than 0 if string1 is greater than string2, and 0 if they are equal. No particular meaning can be reliably inferred from the value aside from its sign.

Changelog

Version Description
8.2.0 This function is no longer guaranteed to return strlen($string1) - strlen($string2) when string lengths are not equal, but may now return -1 or 1 instead.

Examples

Example #1 strcmp() example

<?php
$var1 = "Hello";
$var2 = "hello";
if (strcmp($var1, $var2) !== 0) {
echo '$var1 is not equal to $var2 in a case sensitive string comparison';
}
?>

See Also

  • strcasecmp() - Binary safe case-insensitive string comparison
  • preg_match() - Perform a regular expression match
  • substr_compare() - Binary safe comparison of two strings from an offset, up to length characters
  • strncmp() - Binary safe string comparison of the first n characters
  • strstr() - Find the first occurrence of a string
  • substr() - Return part of a string