Extracting a string from a file name

hddixon3

I was wondering if anyone could help me with a problem that I'm having trying to extract a character string from a file name. I have an upload form and script and am trying to extract the file name without the file extension (i.e. $file_name = "details.pdf"; $desired_string = "details"). When I "echo" the string length of $file_name, the script sends back a value of 0, but the script still uploads the file properly. This leads me to believe that the value of $file_name is not actually a string but some other data type.

Anyone have any ideas on this one???

Thanks in advance,
Dave

thoand

sounds strange.
Are you using: strlen($file_name);

Looks like your variable name is wrong,
since this is an uploaded file, you have to remember that the file name sting is in _name,

eg. file input is called: file_name
after uploading to the server, the variable name is:

$file_name_name

To get the filename without extension you could just explode the string,(quick solution)

$NewString = explode(".", $file_name);
this breaks the string up in parts at the dots(.) and stores them in an array.
so just echo $NewString[0] //Returns eg. "details"

regards Thomas

hddixon3

Thomas,

That worked great! Exactly what I was looking for. I also read in another thread where someone else was having a similar problem. They suggested inserting the copy() function before the call of $file_name because the copy() function is what creates $file_name, $file_type, and $file_size. I did that too.

Here is the code that works now:

if ($uploadfile != "") {
$filestr = explode(".", $uploadfile_name);
$filestr = $filestr[0];
...
...
copy ("$uploadfile", "$pdf") or die ("Couldn't copy file");
}

Thanks a million,
Dave 🙂

LordShryku

Hrmm....what if I uploaded "my.file.pdf"?

coditoergosum

It sounds like you have a couple of issues going on. First of all, use the basename() function to pull the filename minus the extension. The function has an optional second argument that can be used to strip the extension (this solves for the my.file.pdf example). If you need it to handle a variety of file extensions you'll need to dynamically get the extension off the file (I'll let you figure that out... it'll be good practice for you. haha. I'd use a reg exp, but there may be a different way to do it. ).

Second, it doesn't sound like you're getting the filename correctly in your var. I recommend you read this article thoroughly: http://php.net/features.file-upload . Basically you need to get the file name from the $FILES superglobal, i.e. $FILES['userfile']['name'] (directly from that article).

LordShryku

Well, cmon now, I wanted to let him figure it out :p