match any part of a URL

Question

Can anyone help me figure out how to search a URL and print a class based on its result for example:

http://www.?.com/garden-design.html

What i am trying to achieve is using a switch using PHP mathcing a term of say "garden" after the first trailing slash then it would print a class. If it matched construction it would print a different class. There are only three so i know which words to search for. This doesnt have to be dynamic.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can try a regular expression:

/http:\/\/www..+.com\/(garden|construction|indoor)(-design)?.html/

then $1 would give you garden, construction or indoor as string.

you can also use (.+) to collect any string at that spot.

Update made "-design" optional.

Answer 2

I'd have thought that making use of parse_url would probably be a good starting point - you could then explode the path component and then do simply strpos comparisons against the three strings you're looking for, if a simple switch statement isn't sufficient. (Be sure to check for !== false if you go down the strpos route.)

This would potentially be faster than a regex based solution.

Answer 3

Take a look at the php function strpos. With it you could do something like:

$url  = "http://www.nothing.com/garden-design.html";
if (strpos($url, "/garden-design.html"))
    doSomething();
else if (strpos($url, "/construction-design.html"))
    doSomethingElse();
else if (strpos($url, "/indoor-design.html"))
    doSomethingElseInstead();

String matching is generally quicker and more efficient than regular expressions.

Answer 4

If it does not have to be dynamic, you could do it like this:

switch(true)
{
    case stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'garden'):
        return 'garden';
        break;
    case stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'construction'):
        return 'construction';
        break;
    default:
        return 'default';
        break;

}

The above is quite explicit. A more compact solution could be

function getCategory($categories)
{
    foreach($catgories as $category) {
        if stripos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $category) {
            return $category;
        }
    }
}

$categories = array('garden', 'construction', 'indoor');
echo getCategory($categories);

This will not give you the first word after /, but just check if one of your keywords exists in the requested URI and return it.

You could also use parse_url to split the URI into it's components and work with String functions on the path component, e.g.

$path = parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH);

In www.example.com/garden-design.html?foo=bar, this would give you just the part garden-design.html. In your scenario you'd probably still do the stripos on it then, so you can just as well do it directly on the URL instead of parsing it.