Let’s say you have a long URL or file and want to access different parts. PHP has a built-in function called pathinfo() that may be of assistance. Let’s look at a couple examples.

File path
$file_path = ‘/usr/web/tdavid/php-scripts.com/main/index.html’;

URL
$url_path = ‘http://www.php-scripts.com/main/index.html’;

Now let’s dump this into a script and see the output:

<?php
//File path
$file_path = pathinfo(‘/usr/web/tdavid/php-scripts.com/main/index.html’);

//URL
$url_path = pathinfo(‘http://www.php-scripts.com/main/index.html’);

print ‘dirname: ‘ . $file_path[‘dirname’];
print ‘<br />basename: ‘ . $file_path[‘basename’];
print ‘<br />extension: ‘ . $file_path[‘extension’];

print ‘<hr />’;

print ‘dirname: ‘ . $url_path[‘dirname’];
print ‘<br />basename: ‘ . $url_path[‘basename’];
print ‘<br />extension: ‘ . $url_path[‘extension’];
?>

This will produce output that looks like the following:

dirname: /usr/web/tdavid/php-scripts.com/main
basename: index.html
extension: html
——————————————————————————–
dirname: http://www.php-scripts.com/main
basename: index.html
extension: html