People from other scripting languages always think theirs is better because they have a built-in function to do that and not PHP (I am looking at Pythonistas right now :-)).
In fact, it does exist, but few people know it. Meet pathinfo()
:
$ext = pathinfo($filename, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
This is fast and built-in. pathinfo()
can give you other information, such as canonical path, depending on the constant you pass to it.
Remember that if you want to be able to deal with non ASCII characters, you need to set the locale first. E.G:
setlocale(LC_ALL,'en_US.UTF-8');
Also, note this doesn't take into consideration the file content or mime-type, you only get the extension. But it's what you asked for.
Lastly, note that this works only for a file path, not a URL resources path, which is covered using PARSE_URL.
Enjoy
Newer Edit: Lots of things have changed since this question was initially posted - there's a lot of really good information in wallacer's revised answer as well as VisioN's excellent breakdown
Edit: Just because this is the accepted answer; wallacer's answer is indeed much better:
return filename.split('.').pop();
My old answer:
return /[^.]+$/.exec(filename);
Should do it.
Edit: In response to PhiLho's comment, use something like:
return (/[.]/.exec(filename)) ? /[^.]+$/.exec(filename) : undefined;
Best Answer
Markdown is a plain-text file format. The extensions
.md
and.markdown
are just text files written in Markdown syntax. If you have aReadme.md
in your repo, GitHub will show the contents on the home page of your repo. Read the documentation:You can edit the
Readme.md
file in GitHub itself. Click on Readme.md, you will find an edit button. You can preview your changes and even commit them from there.Since it is a text file, Notepad or Notepad++ (Windows), TextEdit (Mac) or any other text editor can be used to edit and modify it. Specialized editors exist that automatically parse the markdown as you type it and generate a preview, while others apply various syntax coloring and decorations to the displayed text. In both cases though, the saved file is still a readable text file.
If you want to create an
md
file with preview and if you prefer not to install any special editors, you can use online editors like dillinger.io and stackedit.io. They provide live preview. You can also export your files to Google Drive or Dropbox.