Question

I’m trying to remove everything after and including ‘.html’ in a web address string. Current (failing) code is:

$input = 'http://example.com/somepage.html?foo=bar&baz=x';
$result = preg_replace("/(.html)[^.html]+$/i",'',$input);

Desired outcome:

value of $result is 'http://example.com/somepage'

Some other examples of $input that should lead to same value $result:

http://example.com/somepage
http://example.com/somepage.html
http://example.com/somepage.html?url=http://example.com/index.html

Answer 1

Your regular expresson is wrong, it would only match strings ending with <one char> "html" <one or more chars matching ., h, t, m or l>. Since preg_replace just returns the string “as-is” if there was no match, you’d be fine with matching the literal .html and ignoring anything after it:

$result = preg_replace('/\.html.*/', '', $input);