Question

I have a full path which I would like to remove certain levels of it. So for instance,

/home/john/smith/web/test/testing/nothing/ 

I would like to get rid of 4 levels, so I get

/test/testing/nothing/ 

What would be a good of doing this?

Thanks

Answer 1

A simple solution is to slice the path up into parts, and then manipulate the array before sticking it back together again:

join('/', array_slice(explode('/', $path), 5)); 

Of course, if you wanted to remove that specific path, you could also use a regular expression:

preg_replace('~^/home/john/smith/web/~', '', $path); 

One word of advice though. If your application is juggling around with paths a lot, it may be a good idea to create a class to represent paths, so as to encapsulate the logic, rather than have a lot of string manipulations all over the place. This is especially a good idea, if you mix absolute and relative paths.