PHP regex to remove last matching pattern string

Question

I have following URLs

http://domain.com/baby/smile/love/index.txt
http://domain.com/baby/smile/love/toy.txt
http://domain.com/baby/smile/love/car.html
and so on...

using preg regex, how to remove the file name on the right? I guess it's required to match the first dash starting from the right, how I can do this?

So for example if I run something like

$newUrl = preg_match('xxxxxx', '', $url);

or using

$newURL = preg_replace(...);

The $newUrl variable will only contain

http://domain.com/baby/smile/love/

preserving the trailing slash at the end. I was able to do it by using explode(), array_pop(), then implode() to put it back together, just wondering if it 's possible using only regex.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can use the following.

function clean($url) {
   $link = substr(strrchr($url, '/'), 1);
   return substr($url, 0, - strlen($link));
}

echo clean($url);

See Live demo

Using regular expression:

$newUrl = preg_replace('~[^/]*$~', '', $url);

See Live demo

Answer 2

<?php
$str = 'http://domain.com/baby/smile/love/index.txt';

$str = preg_replace('/(.*\/).*/', '$1', $str);
print $str;

Output:

http://domain.com/baby/smile/love/