How can I get the current web directory from the URL?

Question

If I have a URL that is http://www.example.com/sites/dir/index.html, I would want to extract the word \"sites\". I know I have to use regular expressions but for some reason my

Answer 1

Just wanted to recommend additionally to check for a prefixed "/" or "\" and to use DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR :

$testPath = dirname(__FILE__);
$_testPath = (substr($testPath,0,1)==DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR) ? substr($testPath,1):$testPath;
$firstDirectory = reset( explode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, dirname($_testPath)) );
echo $firstDirectory;