Are there alternative functions or techniques in PHP, such as using substr and parse_url, that can achieve similar results to regular expressions for extracting specific parts of a URL?

When extracting specific parts of a URL in PHP, you can use functions like substr and parse_url as alternatives to regular expressions. substr can be used to extract a specific portion of the URL based on character positions, while parse_url can parse the URL into its components like scheme, host, path, etc. These functions provide a simpler and more efficient way to extract specific parts of a URL without the complexity of regular expressions.

$url = "https://www.example.com/path/to/page";

// Using substr to extract the host
$host = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST);

// Using parse_url to extract the path
$path = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);

echo "Host: " . $host . "\n";
echo "Path: " . $path;