What regex would find out if file url has certain extension

Question

My valid urls could look more or less like this

http://someurl.com/some/path/file.pdf
or 
http://someurl.com/some/path/file.pdf?param=value
or 
http://someurl.com/some/path/file.pdf?param=value&second=val

where the file extension could be .pdf, or some other extension like .jpg or .psd, or nothing at all.

I have the url stored without the someurl.com portion, so it's the some/path/file.pdf part of the url

How can I use regex to know the file extension if it is present? Is regex the right tool for this?

Answer 1

I would use parse_url() and pathinfo(). These are the most correct functions for the job.

$url = 'http://someurl.com/some/path/file.pdf?param=value';

$path = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);

$ext = pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);

var_dump($ext); // string(3) "pdf"

See is on CodePad.org.

You could use regex, but it will be more difficult to follow.

Answer 2

You would probably need to do a HTTP HEAD request. Regex would work for sure, but you're not guaranteed to catch all cases.

For example:

http://someurl.com/some/path/file might a be a text file without extension (like on most *nix systems) and the regex would fail to provide the file extension.