How to Extract IDs from URLs Using Regular Expressions?

Extracting IDs from URL Using Regular Expressions

In regular expressions, the challenge lies in effectively collecting specific portions of a string. A common task involves capturing everything after the last occurrence of a particular character.

Consider the need to extract an ID from a Google gdata URL such as "http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123." The desired output in this case is "p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123."

To accomplish this using regular expressions, the following pattern can be employed:

[^/]+$

This pattern translates to:

• : Ensures a match of at least one of the above characters
• $: Matches the end of the string

This ensures that the regular expression matches everything after the last '/' without including the '/' itself.

Alternatively, for a more straightforward approach, one can utilize language-specific string processing functions. For PHP, the strrchr() function can be leveraged:

strrchr(Text, '/')

This function returns the substring from the last occurrence of '/' to the end of the string. However, it includes the '/' in the result. To remove it, use substr():

substr(strrchr(Text, '/'), 1);

This approach is generally faster and simpler than using regular expressions.

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