Finding the index of " in a string

I’ve been having a (hopefully stupid) issue, and I was wondering if anyone could help.

I’m trying to determine if a string begins with ", i.e.:

&quot;-------- Original Message

I’ve tried everything–strpos($str, '"') === 0, strpos(html_entity_decode($str), '"') === 0, but, no matter what, I’m always finding that strpos(***, '"') is false–not 0.

There’s more context here (parsing csv rows from a webform, trying to find where a quoted message begins), but I’m coming up empty handed.

I’m using php 7. Coming from a JS/TS background, so some of these nuances might just be going over my head.

Does anyone have any intuition as to what might be going on? I can provide code/more context if need-be. Tried staring this down for a few hours last night, but no dice.

Answer

perhaps this can help… function htmlspecialchars_decode converts " into a quotation mark

<?php
$str = "&quot;--------";
echo "Position is: ";
echo strpos(htmlspecialchars_decode($str), '"'); 
echo "n";
echo "Is quotation mark at the beginning?";
echo strpos(htmlspecialchars_decode($str), '"')==0; 
echo "n"; 
?>

Output:

Position is: 0
Is quotation mark at the beginning? 1

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Answer