Question

I am trying to extract a portion of a URL using regex.

An example of my url would be:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=food

Using php, how could I extract the data in the q variable or the sourceid variable?

Answer 1

Don’t use a regex for this. Instead, use parse_url() and parse_str().

$params = array();
$url= "http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=food";
$url_query = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY);
parse_str($url_query, $params);
echo $params['q']; // Outputs food

Demo