PHP str_replace at the URL

Question

$uri = "http://test.com/test/?q=Marketing&start=2";

$newuri = str_replace("&start=","",$url);

// I want to remove "&start=2"

echo $newuri;

Answer 1

You'll want to use preg_replace instead for this:

$newuri = preg_replace('/&start=(\d+)/','',$uri);

Answer 2

Remember that it is still a valid URI if the position of the querystring elements is changed. So the start parameter may be the first, hence it may be preceded by a ? instead of a &.

So this regex covers both cases:

preg_replace("#[\?&]start=\d+#", '', $uri)

Answer 3

You are passing $url as an argument to str_replace. But the variable that has the url is called $uri.

$uri = "http://test.com/test/?q=Marketing&start=2";

$newuri = str_replace("&start=2","",$uri);

...

Answer 4

Just to throw a regex-free solution out there:

// Grab the individual components of the URL
$uri_components = parse_url($uri); 

// Take the query string from the url, break out the key:value pairs
// then put the keys and values into an associative array
foreach (explode('&', $uri_components['query']) as $pair) {
    list($key,$value) = explode('=', $pair);
    $query_params[$key] = $value;
}

// Remove the 'start' pair from the array and start reassembling the query string
unset($query_params['start']);
foreach ($query_params as $key=>$value)
    $value ? $new_query_params[] = $key."=".$value : $new_query_params[] = $key;

// Now reassemble the whole URL (including the bits removed by parse_url)
$uri_components['scheme'] .= "://";
$uri_components['query'] = "?".implode($new_query_params,"&");
$newuri = implode($uri_components);

Admittedly it's massively verbose compared to the regex-based solutions, but it might provide some extra flexibility down the line?