Howto properly extract part of a request_uri

[mrhatch]

Hi everybody,

what I have is a typical database entry like this: profile.php?userid=988&sid=...

You probably know the "Who is where"-pages in forums, where you can get information about the whereabouts of visitors to your page.
Now that visitors can view profiles of members, I as an admin would like to know whose profile they are watching without querying the database.

My question is: how do I extract the userid?

My approach was easy enoug, but it would take too much time.
I would have taken the substr($string,-19) to cut off the first part of it. But then it really puts me off, because I haven't got a clue how I can decide between integers and strings.
Of course, there is the possibility of looping through the whole string with if (is_numeric etc.) but that would take too much time.

Is there any way to extract the numbers between "=" and "&"?

[Merve]

Use PCRE: preg_match_all().

[mrhatch]

Thank you very much indeed.

The regular expressions where the kind of functions I never wanted to come across so far, but I think now it's time to tackle them 😃