Question

I have a regular expression that I use to reduce multiple slashes to single slashes. The purpose is to read a url that is previously converted to a human readable link using mod_rewrite in apache, like this :

http://www.website.com/about/me

This works :

$uri = 'about//me';
$uri = preg_replace('#//+#', '/', $uri);
echo $uri; // echoes 'about/me'

This doesn’t work :

$uri = '/about//me';
$uri = preg_replace('#//+#', '/', $uri);
echo $uri; // echoes '/about/me'

I need to be able to work with each url parameter alone, but in the second example, if I explode the trailling slash, it would return me 3 segments instead of 2 segments. I can verify in PHP if any if the parameters is empty, but as I’m using that regular expression, it would be nice if the regular expression already take care of that for me, so that I don’t need to worry about segment validation.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

str_replace may be faster in this case

$uri = str_replace("//","/",$uri)

Secondly: use trim: http://hu.php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php

$uri = trim($uri,"/");