Remove a string after the last slash in PHP

This article, will discuss multiple ways to remove a string after the last slash in PHP.

Table Of Contents

Background

In PHP, a common string manipulation task is to remove part of a string following a specific character, such as a slash. This is often necessary when working with file paths, URLs, or similar data structures.

For instance, suppose you have the following string:

$originalString = "path/to/file/fileName.txt";

You want to remove everything after the last slash (/), resulting in:

"path/to/file/"

Let’s look at how to accomplish this.

Solution 1: Using strrpos() and substr()

To solve this problem, you can use a combination of strrpos(), which finds the position of the last occurrence of a substring, and substr(), which can be used to return a part of the string.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
$originalString = "path/to/file/fileName.txt";

// Find the position of the last slash
$lastSlashPos = strrpos($originalString, '/');

// Extract the string up to and including the last slash
$modifiedString = substr($originalString, 0, $lastSlashPos + 1);

echo $modifiedString;
?>

Output

path/to/file/

In this code:
– strrpos($originalString, ‘/’) locates the position of the last slash in $originalString.
– substr($originalString, 0, $lastSlashPos + 1) extracts the substring from the beginning to just after the last slash.
– The resulting string includes everything up to and including the last slash.

Solution 2: Using dirname()

Alternatively, the dirname() function, which is commonly used to get the directory part of a path, can be employed here to get a similar result.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
$originalString = "path/to/file/fileName.txt";

// Get the directory name which includes up to the last slash
$modifiedString = dirname($originalString) . '/';

echo $modifiedString;
?>

Output

path/to/file/

In this code:
– dirname($originalString) returns the directory part of the path, excluding the last segment after the slash.
– We then concatenate a slash at the end to include it in the final string.
– This method is quite straightforward and is specifically tailored for path-like strings.

Summary

To remove a substring after the last slash in a PHP string, both the combination of strrpos() and substr(), and the dirname() function provide effective solutions. The choice between them may depend on the nature of your data. If you’re dealing with file paths or URLs, dirname() is a convenient and semantically clear option. For more general string manipulation, strrpos() and substr() offer greater flexibility.