[RESOLVED] Selecting Part of an URL

fr600

Hello,

Could you please hep me with this? I'm getting an URL from the sql database, let's say:

ftp://domain.com/Document/[B]EBook[/B]/ThisDoc.pdf
ftp://domain.com/Document/[B]Tutorial[/B]/ThisTut.pdf

I want to select the "EBook" and "Tutorial" portion from the url. I mean there are 100s of these. I want to show which subcategory the URLs belong to... provided that Document is the category. How I can do this?

nrg_alpha

I'll give you one way of finding those folders:

// $str = 'ftp://domain.com/Document/EBook/ThisDoc.pdf'; // uncomment this line and comment the next one to see the other result...
$str = 'ftp://domain.com/Document/Tutorial/ThisTut.pdf';
preg_match('#(\w+)$#', dirname($str), $match);
echo $match[1]; // ouputs    Tutorial

If you can collect all your urls into an array...

$str = array('ftp://domain.com/Document/Tutorial/ThisTut.pdf','ftp://domain.com/Document/EBook/ThisDoc.pdf');
foreach($str as $val){
   preg_match('#(\w+)$#', dirname($val), $match);
   echo $match[1] . '<br />';
}

outputs:

Tutorial
EBook

In each loop of foreach, you can store the end result for $match[1] into your database. There you have it 🙂

fr600

Thanks a lot man.

fr600

However, if I make the url longer, it doesn't work.

The thing is I want to output the third part of the url.

$str = '[COLOR="Blue"]ftp://domain.com[/COLOR]/[COLOR="SeaGreen"]Document[/COLOR]/[COLOR="Red"]AAA[/COLOR]/Tutorial/ThisTut.pdf';
preg_match('#(\w+)$#', dirname($str), $match);
echo $match[1];

See the red one? That's that I'm looking for. If the url is like:

ftp://domain.com/Tutorial/Blank/Nothing/Folder/Sub/doc.xls

I want "Blank," the third part. How can I do that?

laserlight

You could tweak the regex, but here is an alternative solution without regex:

$str = 'ftp://domain.com/Tutorial/Blank/Nothing/Folder/Sub/doc.xls';
$dirname = pathinfo(parse_url($str, PHP_URL_PATH), PATHINFO_DIRNAME);
$dirname_parts = explode('/', $dirname);
echo $dirname_parts[2];

Of course, you may want to check that $dirname_parts[2] exists before using it, in case $str does not contain the expected input format.

fr600

Thanks laserlight