Question

I am trying to implement a php script which will run on every call to my site, look for a certain pattern of URL, then explode the URL and perform a redirect.

Basically I want to run this on a new CMS to catch all incoming links from the old CMS, and redirect, based on mapping, say an article id stripped form the URL to the same article ID imported into the new CMS’s DB.

I can do the implementation, the redirect etc, but I am lost on the regex.

I need to catch any occurrences of:

domain.com/content/view/*/34/ or domain.com/content/view/*/30/ (where * is a wildcard) and capture * and the 30 or 34 in a variable which I will then use in a DB query.

If the following is encountered:

domain.com/content/view/*/34/1/*/

I need to capture the first * and the second *.

Be very grateful for anyone who can give me a hand on this.

Answer 1

I’m not sure regular expressions are the way to go. I think it would probably be easier to use explode ('/' , $url) and check by looping over that array.

Here are the steps I would follow:

$url = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH); 
$url = trim($url, '/'); 
$parts = explode ('/' , $url); 

Then you can check if

($parts[0]=='content' && $parts[1]=='view' && $parts[3]=='34')

You can also easily get the information you want with $parts[2].