strpos()

Returns first starting index of the specified substring within string, or zero if it's not present. (Same as position(substring in string), but note the reversed argument order.)

Signature

strpos ( string text, substring text ) → integer

Examples

SELECT strpos('high', 'ig');

Run against PostgreSQL 18.6 on 2026-09-13. This is the output we got, not the documentation’s.

In other engines

PostgreSQL	strpos
MySQL	LOCATE(needle, haystack) or INSTR(haystack, needle)
SQL Server	CHARINDEX(needle, haystack)
Oracle	INSTR(haystack, needle)
SQLite	instr(haystack, needle)

The argument order flips between the LOCATE and INSTR families, which is why a ported query returns 0 instead of erroring — it looked for the haystack inside the needle and honestly did not find it.

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