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 googles gdata.

my example string is http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123

Where the ID is p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123

Oh and I'm using PHP.

Answer 1

Generally:

/([^/]*)$

The data you want would then be the match of the first group.

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Edit   Since you’re using PHP, you could also use strrchr that’s returning everything from the last occurence of a character in a string up to the end. Or you could use a combination of strrpos and substr, first find the position of the last occurence and then get the substring from that position up to the end. Or explode and array_pop, split the string at the / and get just the last part.

Answer 2

This pattern will not capture the last slash in $0, and it won't match anything if there's no characters after the last slash.

/(?<=\/)([^\/]+)$/

Edit: but it requires lookbehind, not supported by ECMAScript (Javascript, Actionscript), Ruby or a few other flavors. If you are using one of those flavors, you can use:

/\/([^\/]+)$/

But it will capture the last slash in $0.

Answer 3

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

^ = 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 4

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 , '/' )

That will include the / in the result though.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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 7

you can also normal string split

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