Regular Expression to Remove Beginning and End chars from a string?

Question

Let's say I have a string like so:

$file = 'widget-widget-newsletter.php';

I want to use preg_replace() to remove the prefix widget- and to remove the suffix .php . Is it possible to use one regular expression to achieve all this?

The resulting string should be widget-newsletter.

Answer 1

$file = preg_replace('/^widget-|\.php$/', '', $file);

Answer 2

Why not use substr? Much simpler and faster.