well take this advice from me. i've been coding php for around 5 years and this is the best words of wisdom i can give you ...
...
the php manual is your friend!
not only does it have an explanation of the function, but it has examples, and a list of other functions like it on the left.
on top of that, the function search works great!
now for basename()
Given a string containing a path to a file, this function will return the base name of the file. If the filename ends in suffix this will also be cut off.
On Windows, both slash (/) and backslash (\) are used as directory separator character. In other environments, it is the forward slash (/).
PHP Code:
<?php
$path = "/home/httpd/html/index.php";
$file = basename($path); // $file is set to "index.php"
$file = basename($path, ".php"); // $file is set to "index"
?>
does that make sense?