Remove first forward slash in a link?

php regex preg-replace
0plus1 picture 0plus1 · Jun 5, 2009 · Viewed 35.9k times · Source

I need to remove the first forward slash inside link formatted like this:

/directory/link.php

I need to have:

directory/link.php

I'm not literate in regular expressions (preg_replace?) and those slashes are killing me..

I need your help stackoverflow!

Thank you very much!

Answer

Stefan Gehrig picture Stefan Gehrig · Jun 5, 2009

Just because nobody has mentioned it before:

$uri = "/directory/link.php";
$uri = ltrim($uri, '/');

The benefit of this one is:

  • compared to the substr() solution: it works also with paths that do not start with a slash. So using the same procedure multiple times on an uri is safe.

  • compared to the preg_replace() solution: it's certainly much more faster. Actuating the regex-engine for such a trivial task is, in my opinion, overkill.

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