Question

This is something I could hack together, but I wondered if anybody had a clean solution to my problem. Something that I throw together wont necessarily be very concise or speedy!

I have a string like this ///hello/world///. I need to strip only the first and last slash, none of the others, so that I get a string like this //hello/world//.

PHP’s trim isn’t quite right right: performing trim($string, '/') will return hello/world.

One thing to note is that the string won’t necessarily have any slashes at the beginning or end. Here are a few examples of what I would like to happen to different strings:

///hello/world/// > //hello/world//
/hello/world/// > hello/world//
hello/world/ > hello/world

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

First thing on my mind:

if ($string[0] == '/') $string = substr($string,1);
if ($string[strlen($string)-1] == '/') $string = substr($string,0,strlen($string)-1);