Have you ever done that before? Looked for a haystack in a needle? It’s quite difficult, as one might imagine, as typically you do not find large haystacks within tiny needles. One might say it was a waste of time, and indeed one would be right.
PHP is picky about its grammar and when you might want to say, “PHP, is this needle in this haystack?” PHP would prefer that you ask “PHP, in this haystack, can this needle be found?” This often is the source of much frustration and wasted time for PHP developers, because PHP is not internally consistent with the order of arguments when you want to search for a needle in a haystack. So if you don’t pay close attention to the order of your arguments, it’s quite easy to find yourself in a situation where you’re asking “PHP, in this needle, can this haystack be found?” When you make this mistake with string functions, you won’t get an error, your script will just not do what you intend for it to do, and on a complex application it’s easy to start the debug process and not realize that that was the error for many minutes.