Help with getting values through regex (php)

Question

So yea, I suck with regular expressions. Needs to be done with php. Thanks. I need to be able to pull out "xx" (will always be 2 lowercase alphabetic chars) and "a12" (can be anything but will always be .php).

String:
http://foo.bar.com/some_directory/xx/a12.php?whatever=youwant

Answer 1

"([a-z]{2})\/([^/]+)\.php"

make sure you are capturing matches. xx will be in group 1, a12 will be in group 2

Answer 2

/([a-z]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)

$string = http://foo.bar.com/some_directory/xx/a12.php?whatever=youwant


$matches;
preg_match("/([a-z]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)", $string, $matches);

$part_1 = $matches[1]; //xx
$part_2 = $matches[2]; //a12

Good luck!

Answer 3

Since he's looking for a PHP solution and not just PCRE, I think something like this might be a bit more comprehensive:

$src = 'http://foo.bar.com/some_directory/xx/a12.php?whatever=youwant';
preg_match( '/([a-z]{2})\/([^\/]+)\.php/', $src, $matches );
/* grab "xx" */
$first = $matches[1];
/* grab "a12" */
$second = $matches[2];