beginner to regex needs to change url using regular expressions

Question

i have a url: /events/details/16-righteous-turkeys.html

that i need to change to /turkeys

i have no idea how to go about doing this...and would really appreciate the help.

Answer 1

The first thing you need to do is specify your problem more clearly.

What you've posted can be achieved simply by assigning the value "/turkeys" to your variable (maybe you want to use an 'if' statement to check it previously contains "/events/details/16-righteous-turkeys.html").

So you need to specify (in English first) how you figured out what the new value should be. An example that may fit what you've posted:

"I need to take my original path and, ignoring the directories, look at the filename on the end. From that, I need to extract everything between the last hyphen and the .html extension on the end. I then need to replace the entire thing with what I've extracted ("turkeys" in this case)".

Answer 2

If you need to always extract the last word between the hyphen and .html the following should do it:

$string = '/events/details/16-righteous-turkeys.html';
$pattern = '/^.*\-(\w+)\.html$/i';
$replacement = '/${1}';
echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);