regular expression matching /admin/something not administrator

Question

Hi I want to match strings like /admin/ or /admin/something or /admin but not /administration or /administrator. I wrote this regular expression:

$pattern = '%^/admin(/|/[a-zA-Z0-9_-]{1,})?$%'

and it works, but it is something ugly. I want to know can it be written more cleaner and understandable?

Answer 1

This regex should work for you:

$pattern = '%^/admin(/[\w-]*)?$%'

This will match any of:

• /admin
• /admin/
• /admin/foobar