Strip off URL parameter with PHP

Solution 1:

The safest "correct" method would be:

1. Parse the url into an array with parse_url()
2. Extract the query portion, decompose that into an array using parse_str()
3. Delete the query parameters you want by unset() them from the array
4. Rebuild the original url using http_build_query()

Quick and dirty is to use a string search/replace and/or regex to kill off the value.

Solution 2:

In a different thread Justin suggests that the fastest way is to use strtok()

 $url = strtok($url, '?');

See his full answer with speed tests as well here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1251650/452515

Solution 3:

This is to complement Marc B's answer with an example, while it may look quite long, it's a safe way to remove a parameter. In this example we remove page_number

<?php
$x = 'http://url.com/search/?location=london&page_number=1';

$parsed = parse_url($x);
$query = $parsed['query'];

parse_str($query, $params);

unset($params['page_number']);
$string = http_build_query($params);
var_dump($string);

Solution 4:

parse_str($queryString, $vars);
unset($vars['return']);
$queryString = http_build_query($vars);

parse_str parses a query string, http_build_query creates a query string.

Solution 5:

function removeParam($url, $param) {
    $url = preg_replace('/(&|\?)'.preg_quote($param).'=[^&]*$/', '', $url);
    $url = preg_replace('/(&|\?)'.preg_quote($param).'=[^&]*&/', '$1', $url);
    return $url;
}