Remove unnecessary slashes from path

Question

$path = \'/home/to//my///site\';

I am trying to remove unnecessary forward slashes / from the path above

I am trying to get this

Answer 1

It replaces (consecutive) occurences of / and \ with whatever is in DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, and processes /. and /.. fine. Paths returned by get_absolute_path() contain no (back)slash at position 0 (beginning of the string) or position -1 (ending)

function get_absolute_path($path) {
    $path = str_replace(array('/', '\\'), DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $path);
    $parts = array_filter(explode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $path), 'strlen');
    $absolutes = array();
    foreach ($parts as $part) {
        if ('.' == $part) continue;
        if ('..' == $part) {
            array_pop($absolutes);
        } else {
            $absolutes[] = $part;
        }
    }
    return implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $absolutes);
}

A test:

var_dump(get_absolute_path('this/is/../a/./test/.///is'));

Returns: string(14) "this/a/test/is"