How do you strip out the domain name from a URL in php?

Question

Im looking for a method (or function) to strip out the domain.ext part of any URL thats fed into the function. The domain extension can be anything (.com, .co.uk, .nl, .what

Answer 1

You can also write a regular expression to get exactly what you want.

Here is my attempt at it:

$pattern = '/\w+\..{2,3}(?:\..{2,3})?(?:$|(?=\/))/i';
$url = 'http://www.example.com/foo/bar?hat=bowler&accessory=cane';
if (preg_match($pattern, $url, $matches) === 1) {
    echo $matches[0];
}

The output is:

example.com

This pattern also takes into consideration domains such as 'example.com.au'.

Note: I have not consulted the relevant RFC.