How to extract a specific area from a user submitted URL in PHP

Question

This may be easy to do but I'm trying to extract only the highlighted area of the url a user will enter into a field. It will always be between the end / and ?

Note:

To clarify, this is just a simple text input field that is pasted. I don't need to modify the page url.

USER FIELD URL

<?php $url = 'https://example.com/test/5tPa414MNG1cNfGjJs1Jr?si=tKTd7qJQ1Sda1ZUWoA5Q'; ?>

WHAT I NEED TO EXTRACT

https://example.com/test/ 5tPa414MNG1cNfGjJs1Jr ?si=tKTd7qJQ1Sda1ZUWoA5Q

The code block section only.

END RESULT

<?php $extracted = '5tPa414MNG1cNfGjJs1Jr'; ?>

Answer 1

You can try this:

preg_match("/(?<=\/)(\w+)(?=\?)/", $url, $match);
echo $match[0];

Answer 2

You could use regular expressions as said in an other answer, but they consume performances and aren't mandatory in this case. Here, I'm splitting the URL on the '/' character, and I take the last part. Then I pick a substring from the beginning of the last part to the '?'.

<?php
$url = 'https://example.com/test/5tPa414MNG1cNfGjJs1Jr?si=tKTd7qJQ1Sda1ZUWoA5Q';
//Explode the URL on the /
$urlParts = explode('/', $url);
//Get the last part
$lastItem = end($urlParts);
$extracted = substr($lastItem, 0, strpos($lastItem, '?'));

This solution gives the same result as the others, but it doesn't use regular expression.