Question

I’m looking for a way to split a Twitter permalink string on its final forward slash, so I can store the tweet_id. Two examples:

http://twitter.com/bloombergnews/status/55231572781170688
#Google Said to Be Possible Target of U.S. FTC Antitrust Probe - http://ow.ly/4tnpW
— Bloomberg (@business) April 5, 2011

Each URL has a similar format:

http://twitter.com/<screen_name>/status/<id_str>

With what regular expression would I easily capture every time?

Answer 1

This is not a job for regular expressions, IMHO.

I would do this:

$parts = explode('/', rtrim($url, '/'));
$id_str = array_pop($parts);