I need some PHP help with strings.
I have a textbox field where users will enter a facebook profile link.
Example: http://facebook.com/zuck
Now the problem is I need to have EXACTLY this string: "http://graph.facebook.com/zuck".
Inputs could be anything like:
http://facebook.com/zuck
http://www.facebook.com/zuck
www.facebook.com/zuck
facebook.com/zuck
What's the best way to do that? Thank you in advance.
To accept anything in the format of facebook.com/username where username is alphanumeric with dots, dashes, and underscores (not sure what Facebook allows exactly):
if (preg_match('%facebook.com/([a-z0-9._-]+)%i', $input, $m))
{
echo 'http://graph.facebook.com/', $m[1], "\n";
}
Why don't you just ask the user for their username? Instead of accepting a wide variety of input, design the form so that they only have to put in their username.
Something along the lines of this;
This way, you don't even have to validate or store anything other than their username. This could be super helpful down the road when Facebook moves fast and breaks stuff, like the URLs of users. Or if you want to form URLs for something other than graph API, you won't have to pull apart an existing URL.
If given inputs will be always as the ones you give i think that strstr function would hadle this
$array = array('http://facebook.com/zuck', 'http://www.facebook.com/buck', 'www.facebook.com/luck', 'facebook.com/nuck');
foreach($array as $data)
{
if(strstr($data, 'facebook.com/'))
{
echo 'http://graph.'.strstr($data, 'facebook.com/') . '<br>';
}
}
This will output
http://graph.facebook.com/zuck
http://graph.facebook.com/buck
http://graph.facebook.com/luck
http://graph.facebook.com/nuck
Find the last slash in the input
$lastpos = strrchr ( $input , '/' )
Manually concatenate the url and everything after that last slash.
$new_url = 'http://www.facebook.com' . substr($input, $lastpos);
$url = 'http://facebook.com/zuck';
$array = explode('/', str_replace('http://', '', $url));
$username = $array[1];
$finalurl = 'http://graph.facebook.com/zuck'.$username;
echo $finalurl;
This will work with any format of input URL.
Something along the lines of:
Pattern:
(https?://)?(www\.)?(.+?)\/([^/]+)
Replace with:
http://graph.$3/$4
Test it here:
facebook.com/usernamewould be the best choice given the inputs you have listed.blahblahfacebook.com/asdf/1234would match "asdf" But I assume you're trying to be aggressive in your matching.