[SOLVED] Regular Expression to collect everything after the last /

Regular Expression to collect everything after the last /

I'm new at regular expressions and wonder how to phrase one that collects everything after the last /.

I'm extracting an ID used by googles gdata.

my example string is http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123

Where the ID is p1f3JYcCu_cb0i0JYuCu123

Oh and I'm using PHP.

Solution

This matches at least one of (anything not a slash) followed by end of the string:

[^/]+$

Notes:

No parens because it doesn't need any groups - result goes into group 0 (the match itself).
Uses + (instead of *) so that if the last character is a slash it fails to match (rather than matching empty string).

But, most likely a faster and simpler solution is to use your language's built-in string list processing functionality - i.e. ListLast( Text , '/' ) or equivalent function.

For PHP, the closest function is strrchr which works like this:

strrchr( Text , '/' )

This includes the slash in the results - as per Teddy's comment below, you can remove the slash with substr:

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