preg_matching last occurence of string in a string??

[carlos1234]

I'e been Googling and Googling and reading and reading to no avail and would really appreciate any input anyone might have on how I can match the last occurence of "swme-" in the following string (this is one of those times when Google is near useless at least with respect to returning any relevant pages). 

 

$string = "/home/carlos/web/swme-site-generator/swme-contact-me.txt"

 

The preg_match I have been trying to work with doesn't work yet.  It's...

 

preg_match('/\/swme-(.*?\.txt)/U', $string)

 

The problem is that the regex matches "/swme-site-generator/swme-contact-me.txt" and not "/swme-contact-me.txt". 

 

I thought that using the '?' would keep it from being greedy but I guess not. 

 

Anybody got any ideas on how to match only the last bit of the string where "swme-" is found? 

 

I am trying to remove the last "swme-" from the string.

 

Thanks.

 

Carlos

[carlos1234]

Thanks for moving this to the correct forum Alex.  I had forgotten there was a regexp forum here when I posted it and then couldn't firgure out how to move it myself. 

 

I kinda solved my problem by using the following revised preg_match but it's not really a solution since it limits my file names to only the characters in the character class involved...which is not really disireable.

 

preg_match('/\/swme-([a-z0-9-]*?\.txt)/U', $string)

 

That will return the string I want when I apply a preg_replace using the same regexp in it. 

 

preg_replace('/\/swme-([a-z0-9-]*?\.txt)/U', '/$1', $string) returns "/home/carlos/web/swme-site-generator/contact-me.txt" which is what I am after. 

 

In other words I am looking at removing the last occurance of "swme-". 

 

But now I am stuck having to remember where this regexp is in the code so as to change it every time I want to allow a new character into file names.  Not good. 

 

There must be a more elegant and generic way to remove the last occurance of "swme-" from the string in question.

 

Anybody? 

 

Carlos

[Alex]

Are you just trying to get the file name from the path? If so regex, although it will work, isn't the best solution. You could just do this:

 

$string = "/home/carlos/web/swme-site-generator/swme-contact-me.txt";
echo pathinfo($string, PATHINFO_BASENAME);

 

If you want the preceding forward slash you can just append that.

[carlos1234]

Thanks Alex but I need the entire path minus the last "swme-".  Too complicated to explain why here but it's part of a CMS system I am creating and I need the full path and base file name to remain. 

 

I mean I could use your approach, strip out the "swme-" from the file name, and then put it all back together again but that seems like a lot of trouble to go through given that there is probably a simple regexp that will accomplish what I want and that I am hoping someone here will point me to. 

 

Carlos

[Alex]

I can't seem to think, and I'm not that great at regex anyway, this will work, but there are probably better solutions.

 

$string = "/home/carlos/web/swme-site-generator/swme-contact-me.txt";
echo strrev(preg_replace('~-emws~', '', strrev($string), 1));

[carlos1234]

Thanks very much for taking the trouble of figuring that out Alex.  Much, much appreciated.  I thought of doing that myself (in theory) but I am actually after just a standard regexp that might do the trick. 

 

We'll see if anyone else can come up with such.  If not I will probably use your solution. 

 

Thanks again Alex!

 

Carlos