Remove characters from beginning and end string - php

Question

I want to ouput only MYID from URL. What I did so far:
$url = "https://whatever.expamle.com/display/MYID?out=1234567890?Browser=0?OS=1";
echo substr($url, 0, strpos($url, "?out="));
output: https://whatever.expamle.com/display/MYID
$url = preg_replace('#^https?://whatever.expamle.com/display/#', '', $url);
echo $url;
ouput: MYID?out=1234567890?Browser=0?OS=1
How can I combine this? Thanks.

Answer 1

For a more general solution, we can use regex with preg_match_all:
$url = "https://whatever.expamle.com/display/MYID?out=1234567890?Browser=0?OS=1";
preg_match_all("/\/([^\/]+?)\?/", $url, $matches);
print_r($matches[1][0]); // MYID

Answer 2

When the string is always a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), like you present it in your question,
given the following string:
$url = "https://whatever.expamle.com/display/MYID?out=1234567890?Browser=0?OS=1";
you can benefit from parsing it first:
$parts = parse_url($url);
and then making use of the fact that MYID is the last path component:
$str = preg_replace(
'~^.*/(?=[^/]*$)~' /* everything but the last path component */,
'',
$parts['path']
);
echo $str, "\n"; # MYID
and then depending on your needs, you can combine with any of the other parts, for example just the last path component with the query string:
echo "$str?$parts[query]", "\n"; # MYID?out=1234567890?Browser=0?OS=1
Point in case is: If the string already represents structured data, use a dedicated parser to divide it (cut it in smaller pieces). It is then easier to come to the results you're looking for.
If you're on Linux/Unix, it is even more easy and works without a regular expression as the basename() function returns the paths' last component then (does not work on Windows):
echo basename(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH)),
'?',
parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY),
"\n"
;
https://php.net/parse_url
https://php.net/preg_replace
https://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.assertions.php