Extract values from xpath type string

[chazmus]

Hello,

 

I'd like to be able to change a string that looks like

 

/root/section/subsection/... (potentially alot more sections)

 

so that

$first = "root"

$rest = "/section/subsection/"

 

The string I gave is just an example, in reality there could be many different names for sections, and the first bit won't always be "root" and could be any length..

I have been googling for about an hour now and can't make any sense of regular expressions!

 

Thanks if you can help

 

[salathe]

As much a fan of regular expressions as I am (ask anyone here), sometimes basic string functions will suffice. Indeed, there are a number of different string functions that could be employed here to do the job!

 

Coming to the rescue today is the under-rated and misunderstood strtok function. The snippet below takes the (x)path and hunts around for the first item and then "everything else", allocating those values to their appropriate variable.

 

$path  = '/root/section/subsection/etc';
$first = strtok($path, '/');
$rest  = '/' . strtok('');
var_dump($first, $rest);

 

If you really want a regular expression solution, or don't really feel like using strtok and would prefer other string functions, do let us know.

[chazmus]

Amazing. strtok wins!