In this lesson we will find out how to get the file extension of any file in PHP.

Let us consider a file with a name of "myFile.php".  We can see that the file extension is php.  The question is, how do we retrieve that in PHP?

The first step is to define a string variable with the filename.  Obviously, this filename may come from a post variable or database field etc.

We will use a function to retrieve and return the filename extension.

The output would be:

The above function will work for filenames where there is only 1 period (.).  However, what if the filename is something like "dbconfig.inc.php".

If we use the above script we will get an error like this:

The reason is that the explode() function is returning an array. If we print out the array we can see what is happening:

The output is:

We need to retrieve the end value in this array. Fortunately, PHP has a function to do that. We can use the end() function as follows: