No need for all that. Check out pathinfo(), it gives you all the components of your path.
Example from the manual:
$path_parts = pathinfo('/www/htdocs/index.html');
echo $path_parts['dirname'], "\n";
echo $path_parts['basename'], "\n";
echo $path_parts['extension'], "\n";
echo $path_parts['filename'], "\n"; // filename is only since PHP 5.2.0
Output of the code:
/www/htdocs
index.html
html
index
And alternatively you can get only certain parts like:
echo pathinfo('/www/htdocs/index.html', PATHINFO_EXTENSION); // outputs html