preg_match() regex pattern for my url

Question

I tried to make a pattern for this url:

http://media.network.com/flv/ea03addc753ff8d80f6be4b49a414cfd/4f3d2012/5016.flv

I just want to retrive the numbers 5016 - fileid from the url.. so i used this code

preg_match( '#http://media\.gilmanetwork\.com/flv/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)\.flv#', $markup, $matches );

so if i use $matches[3] , I should get the number 5016 right?

Answer 1

You've got a big mistake there. gilmanetwork versus network . Try

'#http://media.network.com/flv/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)\.flv#'

Which results in

<?php
$markup = "http://media.network.com/flv/ea03addc753ff8d80f6be4b49a414cfd/4f3d2012/5016.flv";
preg_match( '#http://media.network.com/flv/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)\.flv#', $markup, $matches );
print_r($matches);
// Array ( [0] => http://media.network.com/flv/ea03addc753ff8d80f6be4b49a414cfd/4f3d2012/5016.flv [1] => ea03addc753ff8d80f6be4b49a414cfd [2] => 4f3d2012 [3] => 5016 ) 

Answer 2

Take a look at parse_url() , combined with pathinfo() :

$url      = 'http://media.network.com/flv/ea03addc753ff8d80f6be4b49a414cfd/4f3d2012/5016.flv';
$filename = pathinfo(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH), PATHINFO_FILENAME);

echo $filename;  // 5016

This approach has an advantage over regular expressions in that the format of the URL can change - and potentially pretty extensively – but so long as the filename of the resource is its ID number, this code will always produce the correct result.