Question

Please read the code below and comments to see what I’m trying to do. Its hard to explain in a paragraph.

$url_fixx = 'home/sublink/group-view/product/catview1'; 
// What my variable holds. MY GOAL IS: I want to omit group-view, product and catview1 from this so I use the trick below. 

catview has a random number at the end so I use the code below to find the number at the end and it outputs “catview1” in this case

$string = $url_fixx;
$matches = array();
if (preg_match('#(catview\d+)$#', $string, $matches)) {
    $catViewCatch = ($matches[1]);
 }
// I got this from http://stackoverflow.com/a/1450969/1567428

$url_fixx = str_replace( array( 'group-view/', 'product', 'catview1' ), '', $url_fixx );
// this outputs what I want. 

MY QUESTION IS :

//When I replace "catview1" with $catViewCatch, the whole str_replace doesnt work. 
$url_fixx = str_replace( array( 'group-view/', 'product', $catViewCatch), '', $url_fixx );

Why is that? and what am I doing wrong?

PS: Also my url sometimes changes to something like this.
$url_fixx = ‘home/sublink/group-view/anotuer-sublink/123-article’

How can I tackle all these ?

Answer 1

Both of your examples output the exact same thing. The below code demonstrates this:

<?php
$url_fixx = 'home/sublink/group-view/product/catview1';

$string = $url_fixx;
$matches = array();
if (preg_match('#(catview\d+)$#', $string, $matches)) {
    $catViewCatch = ($matches[1]);
}
echo str_replace( array( 'group-view/', 'product', 'catview1' ), '', $url_fixx );
echo '<br />';
echo str_replace( array( 'group-view/', 'product', $catViewCatch), '', $url_fixx );
?>

Also, you might consider using preg_replace instead as it will accomplish the task with less code:

echo preg_replace('#group-view/product/catview[0-9]+#','',$url_fixx);