Whats the quickest way to extract data from string?

[PumpkinHead]

Hi,

As I have screwed my mod rewrite (!) I need to extract some information from the url.

www.mydomain.com/widgets_blue/type_001/id_#*$!x
www.mydomain.com/widgets_red/type_003/id_xxxx
www.mydomain.com/widgets_yellow/type_002/id_xxxx

"$id = $HTTP_GET_VARS['id'];" doesn't work for some reason if the url doesn't have a slash at the end...

www.mydomain.com/widgets_yellow/type_002/id_xxxx/

(If the slash is there, then it works fine?)

So I need to quickly extract the value of id (in the above examples 'xxxx').

Whats the best way of doing this? I was thinking about moving it into an array and reading backwards(?).

Thanks in advance

[jatar_k]

maybe take a look at parse_url [php.net] and see if that helps

[PumpkinHead]

Thanks for that, but I couldnt get it to work. Is there anyway that I can scan a string for a value (in this instance 'id_' and return the starting position?

Edit : Nevermind, found it! (strpos)

[stu_uk]

you could also use the explode string function on "id_"

[twist]

$name = ltrim( basename( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] ), "id_" );