Extracting Information from URL with PHP

Question

I would like to use PHP to extract the information from a url. How can I get the value "matt" from the url:

www.shareit.me/matt 

Also, how can I possibly check to see if there is a value there to begin with?

Answer 1

No need to over-complicate things here:

$url  = 'www.shareit.me/matt';
$segs = explode('/', $url);
echo $segs[1]; // matt

Checking to see if it exists is as simple as if ( !empty($segs[1]) ) {}

Assuming you want the value matt and not just the "path", this will work with all these:

www.shareit.me/matt // matt
www.shareit.me/matt/photos
www.shareit.me/matt/photos/vacation/nebraska/cows/ // matt
www.shareit.me/matt/photos?vacation=mexico&gallery=donkeyshow // matt
www.shareit.me/matt/loves/cheese // matt

If you actually want people to know that matt loves cheese, you should use parse_url() instead:

parse_url('www.shareit.me/matt/loves/cheese', PHP_URL_PATH); // /matt/loves/cheese

Answer 2

voila, RTM: http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php

<?php

$url = 'http://username:password@hostname/path?arg=value#anchor';
print_r(parse_url($url));
echo parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);
?>

The above example will output:

Array
(
    [scheme] => http
    [host] => hostname
    [user] => username
    [pass] => password
    [path] => /path
    [query] => arg=value
    [fragment] => anchor
)
/path

Answer 3

You could use the parse_url function, this will return an array with all the information about the URL. Something like this is probably what you would like:

echo explode('/', parse_url('http://www.shareit.me/matt')['path'])[1];

Answer 4

Code:

$url = "http://www.shareit.me/matt";

$parts = Explode('/', $url);

$id = $parts[count($parts) - 1];

Demonstration:

• http://stepolabs.com/lab/explode/index.php

• http://stepolabs.com/lab/explode/index.php.txt

By the way Getting a part from a string.

Answer 5

If you want to get the url that is used to browse to the script, you use the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variable. In your case it will return this:

/matt 

But you'll need to filter out the information you actual need. For that you can use preg_match or an alternative way. For more information about the $_SERVER variable: see this page

If you want to get information of a string that contains a url, you can use

explode("/", $url);

Answer 6

you can use regex with preg_match

preg_match("/.\/(.*)$/",$url,$matches);

than check matches if it contains what you want