regex - Regular Expressions - Parsing a url -

i've delved regular expressions 1 of first times in order parse url. without going depth, want friendly urls , i'm saving each permalink in database, because of differences in languages , pages want save 1 permalink , parse url page , language. if i'm getting this:

http://domain.com/lang/fr/category/9/category_title/page/3.html

all want bit "category/9/category_title" know page i'm on. i've come function:

$return = array();  $string = 'http://domain.com/lang/fr/category/9/category_title/page/3.html';  //remove domain , http $string = preg_replace('@^(?:http://)?([^/]+)@i','',$string);  if(preg_match('/^\/lang\/([a-z]{2})/',$string,$langmatches)) {  $return['lang'] = $langmatches[1];  //remove lang  $string = preg_replace('/^\/lang\/[a-z{2}]+/','',$string); } else {  $return['lang'] = 'en'; }  //get extension $bits = explode(".", strtolower($string)); $return['extension'] = end($bits);  //remove extension $string = preg_replace('/\.[^.]+$/','',$string);  if(preg_match('/page\/([1-9+])$/',$string,$pagematches)) {  $return['page'] = $pagematches[1];  //remove lang  $string = preg_replace('/page\/[1-9+]$/','',$string); } else {  $return['page'] = 1; }  //remove additional slashes beginning , end $string = preg_replace('#^(/?)|(/?)$#', '', $string);  $return['permalink'] = $string;  print_r($return); 

which returns above example:

array (     [lang] => fr     [extension] => html     [page] => 3     [permalink] => category/9/category_title ) 

this perfect , want. question is, have gone using regular expressions correctly? there better way this, instance strip domain, extension , additional slashes @ beginning , end 1 kick ass expression?

you should use parse_url split url components. , when having url path, can use explode split path segments, array_slice specific segments , pathinfo extension.