Extract filename with extension from filepath string

Question

I am looking to get the filename from the end of a filepath string, say

$text = "bob/hello/myfile.zip";

I want to be able to obtain the file name, which I guess would involve getting everything after the last slash as a substring. Can anyone help me with how to do this is PHP? A simple function like:

$fileName = getFileName($text);

Jehanna

check out: strrchr() on php.net, or use basename as suggested – Uncouple

Answer 1

Check out basename().

Clamper

Answer 2

For more general needs, use negative value for start parameter.
For e.g.

<?php
$str = '001234567890';
echo substr($str,-10,4);
?>

will output
1234

Using a negative parameter means that it starts from the start'th character from the end.

Wapiti

While other questions solve the real problem the OP had this answers the question in the title perfectly. Thank you, I was pretty sure I just needed to use negative number but wanted confirmation. – Susanasusanetta

Answer 3

$text = "bob/hello/myfile.zip";
$file_name = end(explode("/", $text));
echo $file_name; // myfile.zip

end() returns the last element of a given array.

Afterdamp

Answer 4

As Daniel posted, for this application you want to use basename(). For more general needs, strrchr() does exactly what the title of this post asks.

http://us4.php.net/strrchr

Latish

Answer 5

I suppose you could use strrpos to find the last '/', then just get that substring:

$fileName = substr( $text, strrpos( $text, '/' )+1 );

Though you'd probably actually want to check to make sure that there's a "/" in there at all, first.

Clausen

Or you could use basename(), like they said. That's better. – Clausen

Answer 6

function getSubstringFromEnd(string $string, int $length)
{
    return substr($string, strlen($string) - $length, $length);
}

function removeSubstringFromEnd(string $string, int $length)
{
    return substr($string, 0, strlen($string) - $length);
}

echo getSubstringFromEnd("My long text", 4); // text
echo removeSubstringFromEnd("My long text", 4); // My long

Microhenry

Please add some explanation to your answer. To me, it does not look like you can simply remove a file extension with it – Crowson

@NicoHaase I have added a method for that. – Microhenry

How does that code work? What about file extensions that are not four characters long? If the length of that extension is not known before calling one of your magic functions, how is that supposed to work? – Crowson