# findtext proc

Source: https://ref.dm-lang.org/proc/findtext

### Format
> `findtext(Haystack,Needle,Start=1,End=0)`

### Returns
> The first position of Needle in Haystack; 0 if not found.

### Args
- `Haystack`: The text string to search.
- `Needle`: The sub-text to search for. May be a regular expression (regex).
- `Start`: The text byte position in Haystack in which to begin the search.
- `End`: The text byte position in Haystack immediately following the last character to search.


When Needle is text, this instruction is NOT sensitive to the case of Haystack or Needle. The case-sensitive version is findtextEx().

```dm /findtext/
if(findtext("Hi There","there")==0)
  world << "Not found!"
else
  world << "Found!"
```

This outputs "Found!", since "there" is a part of the string "Hi There", ignoring case.

If the start or end position is negative, the position is counted backwards from the end of the string. E.g., findtext("Banana", "na", -3) starts three characters from the end and only searches the final "ana".

> [!note]
> 
> In strings containing non-ASCII characters, byte position and character position are not the same thing. Use `findtext_char()` to work with character counts instead of bytes, at a performance cost. See the [Unicode](https://ref.dm-lang.org/notes/Unicode.md) section for more information.

### See also
- [findlasttext proc](https://ref.dm-lang.org/proc/findlasttext.md)
- [findtextEx proc](https://ref.dm-lang.org/proc/findtextEx.md)
- [replacetext proc](https://ref.dm-lang.org/proc/replacetext.md)
- [Regular expressions](https://ref.dm-lang.org/notes/regex.md)