Posted by Jim Carlock on 03/07/06 18:57

I'm creating a lot of arrays. Some of the arrays carry words
that get duplicated...

For example:
$aCities = {"Durham", "Raleigh", "Raleigh-Durham", "Salem", "Winston", "Winston-Salem" }

I've been using stristr alot but that ends up meaning that I
must take the arrays out of alphabetical order and in the
end it complicates things on my part. I'll comparing it to the
strcmp() function right at the moment but I ran into some
difficulties with strcmp() a couple nights ago, along the lines
of having to convert the strings in the array lower-case (all
my arrays are currently stored in a ucwords() format). The
dashes in the names also present a bit of a problem.

The way I'm currently doing the comparisons...

function GetCity($sSearchThis) {
$aAllCities = GetAllCitiesArray();
// make sure parameter is lowercase
$sSearchMe = strtolower($sSearchThis);
foreach ($aAllCities as $sThisCity) {
if (stristr($sSearchMe, $sThisCity) !== FALSE) {
return($sThisCity);
}
// default to raleigh
return("raleigh");
}

What's the best way to accomplish this or is there a better
way under the following conditions:

(1) The item passed in IS a string (not an array).
(2) A default string is always returned when no match is found.
(3) The alphabetical order of the array must remain alphabetized.
(4) The dashes are not required.

Thanks for taking your time and thanks for your consideration in
helping.

Jim Carlock
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