The most straightforward way to prevent this function from returning 0 is:
strpos('x'.$haystack, $needle, 1)
The 'x' is simply a garbage character which is only there to move everything 1 position.
The number 1 is there to make sure that this 'x' is ignored in the search.
This way, if $haystack starts with $needle, then the function returns 1 (rather than 0).
