Question

i want to give regex a pattern and force it to read it all ..

http://example.com/w/2/1/x/some-12345_x.png

i want to target “some-12345_x”
i used this /\/(.*).png/, it doesnt work for some reason

how do i force it to remember it must start with / and end with .png?

Answer 1

If you always want to get the final file-name, minus the extension, you could use PHP’s substr() instead of trying to come up with a regex:

$lastSlash = strrpos($url, '/') + 1;
$name = substr($url, $lastSlash, strrpos($url, '.') - $lastSlash);

Also, a more readable method would be to use PHP’s basename():

$filename = basename($url);
$name = substr($filename, 0, strpos($filename, '.'));

To actually use a regex, you could use the following pattern:

.*/([^.]+).png$

To use this with PHP’s preg_match():

preg_match('|.*/([^.]+).png$|', $url, $matches);
$name = $matches[1];