strpbrk(3)

✨ strpbrk(3) — string search characters ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because today we're talking about strpbrk from the Library Functions Manual 💖 it lives in the Standard C library (libc, link it with -lc) and honestly? she's a whole vibe. a slightly confusingly-named vibe. but a vibe.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

#include <string.h>

char *strpbrk(const char *s, const char *accept);

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so here's the tea 🍓 strpbrk() goes looking through the string s and finds the first occurrence of any of the bytes in the string accept. like, any single one of them. first one it bumps into? that's the one, no cap.

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🎀 RETURN VALUE 🎀

she gives you back a pointer to the byte in s that matches one of the bytes in accept 🫶 and if there is literally no such byte anywhere? you get NULL. sad but true bestie 😭

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👑 ATTRIBUTES 👑

for the whole explanation of what these fancy terms even mean, check out attributes(7) (iykyk).

• strpbrk() — Thread safety: MT-Safe ✨ (yes queen, multiple threads can hang out here, we love to see it)

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🌈 STANDARDS 🌈

C11, POSIX.1-2008. certified iconic ⭐

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🦋 HISTORY 🦋

POSIX.1-2001, C89, SVr4, 4.3BSD. she's been around since forever, a true legacy main character 💜

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💀 BUGS 💀

not me having to say this but... the name of this function is bad 🙈 it should have been named strchrs(). the NAME section up above reflects this. we don't make the rules, we just report them 😭

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• strchr(3)
• string(3)
• strsep(3)
• strspn(3)
• strstr(3)
• wcspbrk(3)

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and that's the whole page, periodt 💅 this was Linux man-pages 6.20, dated 2026-08-10 🎀 go forth and search those strings, bestie, you got this 🌸🫶✨