Question

I don’t know regular expressions so well, I have a doubt regarding the possibility to get partials variables from a regex check. I try to explain what I am looking for…

I have those kind of paths:

example.com/dir1/
example.com/dir1/val1
example.com/dir1/val1-val2

I would like to create an expression that extracts dir1 val1 and val2.

My questions is:

Can I extract only the variables that exists or do I have to write 3 expressions? I mean…

If I put a rule to use: example.com/dir1/val1-val2

Can I only get dir1 if I pass url like: www.example.com/category (dir1 = category) ?

then If the url was: www.example.com/category/car

get dir1 = category and val1 = car

Answer 1

explode("/", $url) is easiest if possible. If the structure is more complex than that allows for, you could use preg_split() instead and list all the possible characters that can be used as subdividers.

$urlParts = preg_split('/[_\/-]/', $url);