How to get the file type from URL in PHP?

Example

Return the file type for "test.txt":

echo filetype("test.txt");
?>

Definition and Usage

The filetype() function returns the file type of a file.

Possible return values:

• fifo
• char
• dir
• block
• link
• file
• socket
• unknown

Note: The result of this function is cached. Use clearstatcache() to clear the cache.

Syntax

Parameter Values

Technical Details

More Examples

Example

Return the file type for /images/:

echo filetype("/images/");
?>

In PHP, there exist various ways of getting a file extension. In our tutorial, we have chosen the 5 best ways that will help you to get a file extension straightforwardly.

Go ahead and choose the one that matches your project better.

The first way is exploding a file variable and getting the last element of the array. That will be a file extension. Here is how you can do it:

In the framework of the second approach, we recommend detecting the last occurrence of ‘.’, which will return a ‘.jpg’. Afterwards, you need to remove the first character of a string using substr. As a result, the exact file extension ‘.jpg’ will be returned.

Here is an example:

The next way is to use strrpos for detecting the position of the last occurrence of ‘.’ inside a file name, incrementing that position by 1 so that it explodes a string from (.).

The example is shown below:

In the framework of this approach, you should apply a regular expression reach and replacement.

Here is an example:

And, the final approach that we recommend is to use the PHP pathinfo() function. It is aimed at returning information about the file. In case the second optional parameter is not passed, an associative array will be returned. It will include the dirname, extension, basename, and filename. Once the second parameter is passed, then specific information will be returned.

Here is an example:

So, after learning about all the possible ways described above, you are free to choose the best one for you. In our opinion, the simplest, yet the most efficient way among all these options is the pathinfo() function.

We will use the built-in function pathinfo() to get the file extension. This function extracts the path information from the given path. The correct syntax to use this function is as follows.

pathinfo($pathName, $options);

The built-in function pathinfo() has two parameters. The details of its parameters are as follows

This function returns an associative array containing a directory name, base name, extension, and file name. If the

The program below shows can we use the pathinfo() function to get file extension.

We have passed the

Output:

If we don’t pass the

Output:

The associative array is: 
array(4) {
  ["dirname"]=>
  string(1) "."
  ["basename"]=>
  string(20) "E:\work\CM\myppt.ppt"
  ["extension"]=>
  string(3) "ppt"
  ["filename"]=>
  string(16) "E:\work\CM\myppt"
}

Use 4 Construct and 5 Function to Get File Extension in PHP

In PHP, we can also use

$variableName = new SplFileInfo($pathName);

The construct

We will use

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