Question

I’m trying to get a users ID from a string such as:

http://www.abcxyz.com/123456789/

To appear as 123456789 essentially stripping the info up to the first / and also removing the end /. I did have a look around on the net but there seems to be so many solutions but nothing answering both start and end.

Thanks 🙂

Update 1

The link can take two forms: mod_rewrite as above and also “http://www.abcxyz.com/profile?user_id=123456789”

Answer 1

I would use parse_url() to cleanly extract the path component from the URL:

$path = parse_URL("http://www.example.com/123456789/", PHP_URL_PATH);

and then split the path into its elements using explode():

$path = trim($path, "/"); // Remove starting and trailing slashes
$path_exploded = explode("/", $path);

and then output the first component of the path:

echo $path_exploded[0]; // Will output 123456789

this method will work in edge cases like

• http://www.example.com/123456789?test
• http://www.example.com//123456789
• www.example.com/123456789/abcdef

and even

• /123456789/abcdef