in PHP using 'if statement' to find a word

I have a text file with several lines of text, eg:

JOHN
MIKE
BEN
JAMES
PETE

I read that contents into an array, with each line of text, placed into a seperate element of the array.

I then tested each element of the array, to find a phrase, say 'BEN'

ie:

for( $a = 0; $a < 5; $a++ )
{
if ($contents[$a] == "BEN") 
{
echo "$contents[$a]";
}
}

but this fails to recognise 'BEN'

but if I was looking for a number instead of a word, from:

JOHN
MIKE
10
JAMES
PETE

or from...

5
10
15
20
25

and used the same code, to look for the number, eg: say '10'

if ($contents[$a] == 1开发者_运维百科0)
    {
    echo "$contents[$a]";
    }

then this works ok, so why ?

Also...

I dont get the problem if the individual lines of text, are already in the array, only when they are READ from the text file...

$contents[0] = "JOHN";
$contents[1] = "MIKE";
$contents[2] = "BEN";
$contents[3] = "JAME";
$contents[4] = "PETE";

I presume that the strings you read from the text file contain the trailing end-of-line character for each line, that's why you cannot find BEN (since that string does not include the trailing end-of-line character). Use the trim function to get rid of trailing whitespace in your strings before comparing them against strings.

Try using array_search()

if ($index = array_search('BEN', $contents) {
    echo $contents[$index];
}

Probably because when you read line from file, you also have newline (\n) character at the end of string. Use rtrim() to strip it.

You should also check out strcmp() for comparing strings in PHP.