Question

Regex is my bete noire, can anyone help me isolate a string from a URL?

I want to get the page name from a URL which could appear in any of the following ways from an input form:

https://www.facebook.com/PAGENAME?sk=wall&filter=2
http://www.facebook.com/PAGENAME?sk=wall&filter=2
www.facebook.com/PAGENAME
facebook.com/PAGENAME?sk=wall

… and so on.

I can’t seem to find a way to isolate the string after .com/ but before ? (if present at all). Is it preg_match, replace or split?

If anyone can recommend a particularly clear and introductory regex guide they found useful, it’d be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use the parse_url function and then get the last segment from the path of the url:

$parts=parse_url($url);
$path_parts=explode("/", $parts["path"]);
$page=$path_parts[count($path_parts)-1];