Help with getting values through regex (php)

Question

So yea, I suck with regular expressions. Needs to be done with php. Thanks. I need to be able to pull out "xx" (will always be 2 lowercase alphabetic chars) and "a12" (can be anything but will always be .php).

String:
http://foo.bar.com/some_directory/xx/a12.php?whatever=youwant

Just a note - a few of the responses so far seem to have accidentally forgotten to escape a forward slash or two in their regular expression, so whichever answer suits you, be sure to double-check that or PHP will likely throw you garbage about unknown modifiers and such. Cheers! — Chris Tonkinson
– Chris Tonkinson, Commented Jul 9, 2009 at 19:57

Chris Tonkinson · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-09 19:50:21Z

1

Since he's looking for a PHP solution and not just PCRE, I think something like this might be a bit more comprehensive:

$src = 'http://foo.bar.com/some_directory/xx/a12.php?whatever=youwant';
preg_match( '/([a-z]{2})\/([^\/]+)\.php/', $src, $matches );
/* grab "xx" */
$first = $matches[1];
/* grab "a12" */
$second = $matches[2];

answered Jul 9, 2009 at 19:50

Chris Tonkinson

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2 Comments

Louis W Over a year ago

I picked this one because it was the only one that didn't error when ran. I also found it helpful to add some_directory\/ to make sure I had a valid match.

Chris Tonkinson Over a year ago

Good call. I got tunnel vision on the xx/a12.php piece and didn't even think about the rest of the string - which of course you could either build into the regular expression or do some verification before hand, as in if ( strpos( $src, 'foo.bar.com/some_directory' ) === 0 ) { // regex stuff } else { // error stuff }

Ben Hughes · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-09 19:42:37Z

0

"([a-z]{2})\/([^/]+)\.php"

make sure you are capturing matches. xx will be in group 1, a12 will be in group 2

edited Jul 9, 2009 at 19:42

answered Jul 9, 2009 at 19:26

Ben Hughes

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1 Comment

Chris Tonkinson Over a year ago

I think it's entirely rational to use + instead of * at the end there - it's an extra check on bogus data because it ensures that the filename isn't just be an extension. Either will work, but there's no reason not to have the extra validation.

Tyler · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-09 19:44:24Z

0

/([a-z]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)

$string = http://foo.bar.com/some_directory/xx/a12.php?whatever=youwant


$matches;
preg_match("/([a-z]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)", $string, $matches);

$part_1 = $matches[1]; //xx
$part_2 = $matches[2]; //a12

Good luck!

answered Jul 9, 2009 at 19:44

Tyler

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