Regular Expression to collect everything after the last /

Question

I\'m new at regular expressions and wonder how to phrase one that collects everything after the last /.

I\'m extracting an ID used by Google\'s GData.

Answer 1

/^.*\/(.*)$/

^ = start of the row

.*\/ = greedy match to last occurance to / from start of the row

(.*) = group of everything that comes after the last occurance of /

Answer 2

This matches at least one of (anything not a slash) followed by end of the string:

[^/]+$

Notes:

• No parens because it doesn't need any groups - result goes into group 0 (the match itself).
• Uses + (instead of *) so that if the last character is a slash it fails to match (rather than matching empty string).

But, most likely a faster and simpler solution is to use your language's built-in string list processing functionality - i.e. ListLast( Text , '/' ) or equivalent function.

For PHP, the closest function is strrchr which works like this:

strrchr( Text , '/' )

This includes the slash in the results - as per Teddy's comment below, you can remove the slash with substr:

substr( strrchr( Text, '/' ), 1 );

Answer 3

You can also get the "filename", or the last part, with the basename function.

<?php
$url = 'http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123';

echo basename($url); // "p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123"

On my box I could just pass the full URL. It's possible you might need to strip off http:/ from the front.

Basename and dirname are great for moving through anything that looks like a unix filepath.

Answer 4

based on @Mark Rushakoff's answer the best solution for different cases:

<?php
$path = "http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123?var1&var2#hash";
$vars =strrchr($path, "?"); // ?asd=qwe&stuff#hash
var_dump(preg_replace('/'. preg_quote($vars, '/') . '$/', '', basename($path))); // test.png
?>

1. Regular Expression to collect everything after the last /
2. How to get file name from full path with PHP?

Answer 5

you can also normal string split

$str = "http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123";
$s = explode("/",$str);
print end($s);

Answer 6

Not a PHP programmer, but strrpos seems a more promising place to start. Find the rightmost '/', and everything past that is what you are looking for. No regex used.

Find position of last occurrence of a char in a string