Question

I just don’t seem to have any luck with regular expressions ! I’ve written a WordPress plugin which grabs (in theory) a category and an optional page number from a url but I just can’t get it to match the url pattern.

The url’s are of the format:

Bikes/Hybrid-Bikes

Bikes/Hybrid-Bikes/1

Bikes/Hybrid-Bikes/2

etc

and:

Bikes/Mountain-Bikes

Bikes/Mountain-Bikes/1

Bikes/Mountain-Bikes/2

and so on.

Here’s the regex I’m trying to use:

   Bikes/([^/]+)(?:/(\d+))?

which matches the category but not the page number. I’m sure I’m 99% of the way there but I just can’t figure this out !

Thanks in advance

Phil

Answer 1

You were very close indeed.

Add the start and end (^$) markers to complete the expression:

^Bikes/([^/]+)(?:/(\d+))?$

PHP working example:

$string = "Bikes/Hybrid-Bikes/1";

var_dump(
    preg_match(
        "~^Bikes/([^/]+)(?:/(\d+))?$~i",
        $string
    )
);