How to get the last segment of a path or URL using JavaScript
While working on a project, I had the need to get the last segment of a path.
In this case it was a filesystem path, but this would work also for URLs.
This is the JavaScript code I used:
const lastItem = thePath.substring(thePath.lastIndexOf('/') + 1)
How does this work?
The thePath
string contains a path. Like /Users/Flavio/Desktop
, for example.
We identify the index of the last /
in the path, calling lastIndexOf('/')
on the thePath
string.
Then we pass that to the substring()
method we call on the same thePath
string.
This will return a new string that starts from the position of the last /
, + 1 (otherwise we’d also get the /
back).
Finally, we assign that string to lastItem
.
You can make a simple function for it, too:
const getLastItem = thePath => thePath.substring(thePath.lastIndexOf('/') + 1)
getLastItem('/Users')
getLastItem('/Users/Flavio')
getLastItem('/Users/Flavio/test.jpg')
getLastItem('https://flavicopes.com/test')
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