How do I get a file extension in PHP?

Question

This is a question you can read everywhere on the web with various answers:

$ext = end(explode(\'.\', $filename));
$ext = substr(strrchr($filename, \'.\'), 1         


        

Answer 1

Sometimes it's useful to not to use pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION). For example:

$path = '/path/to/file.tar.gz';

echo ltrim(strstr($path, '.'), '.'); // tar.gz
echo pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION); // gz

Also note that pathinfo fails to handle some non-ASCII characters (usually it just suppresses them from the output). In extensions that usually isn't a problem, but it doesn't hurt to be aware of that caveat.