Searching for a literal substring

Problem

You want to find out whether a string contains a particular string inside of it.

Solution

The function strfind() will return the indices of the beginning of each occurance of a substring.

strfind('foobar bar','bar')
%  4  8

Since an array containing all nonzero values is treated as true by if, you can do things like this:

string  = 'this string has a ring';
pattern = 'ring';

if strfind(string, pattern)
   disp(['Found a '  pattern]);
end