Regular Expression to Extract String from URL

Question

I am looking to extract a string from a URL. Here is an example to illustrate what I am looking for.

Input URL: http://www.nba.com/bulls/stats/ Output : bulls

In other words, I want to be able to extract the string between the second last and last "/" in the url. I know that I can split by "/" and extract the second last term, but am looking for a cleaner regex solution.

Any ideas?

I don't grok regex and your string splitting option seemed pretty straight forward to me: head(tail(unlist(strsplit(URL, "/")), 2), 1) — Chase
– Chase, Commented Mar 28, 2011 at 2:04
The string between the second last and the last / is stats, not bulls. Did you mean you want the string between the third last and second last /? — G. Grothendieck
– G. Grothendieck, Commented Mar 28, 2011 at 3:35

Max · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-27 23:19:33Z

3

Try this:

http://[^/]+/([^/]+)/[^/]+/?

answered Mar 27, 2011 at 23:19

Max

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Justin Morgan · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-27 23:16:55Z

1

If you must do it by regex, you could simply do this (assuming JavaScript-style regex syntax):

/\/([^\/]*)\/[^\/]*\/$/

For the sake of making it easier to understand, the .NET version would be this:

@"/([^/]*)/[^/]*/$"

However, I think the idea of splitting on / is really the right way to do this.

answered Mar 27, 2011 at 23:16

Justin Morgan

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pcofre · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-28 01:39:55Z

1

The following regex can do the job

http[s]?://[\w\.]+/(\w+)/.*

edited Mar 28, 2011 at 1:39

answered Mar 27, 2011 at 23:16

pcofre

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3 Comments

Max Over a year ago

I probably meant http[s]? instead of http[s]*

Justin Morgan Over a year ago

This won't match if there are any special characters in the string, such as - or %. I'm not sure if that's relevant or not.

Sungwon Jeong Over a year ago

https? is simple as Czechnology mentioned above.. you don't need to put [] around s

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