Regex: Stripping ID of Youtube video from URL

Question

I am currently using regex code to separate YT video ids. The reason I am using regex is that yt video URLs vary in many formats. I have built a regex that will pretty much detect the ID of almost all YT url formats except the one below. I have tried modifying it but no luck. Is there a way to have Regex strip the id from the URL below?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=v-feature&v=317a815FLWQ

Regex:

('~https?://(?:[0-9A-Z-]+\.)?(?:youtu\.be/| youtube\.com\S*[^\w\-\s])([\w\-]{11})(?=[^\w\-]|$)(?![?=&+%\w]*(?:[\'"][^<>]*>| </a>))[?=&+%\w]*~ix','http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1',$url);

Use your language's URL parsing functions to read the query string. — Burhan Khalid, Jul 20 '12 at 07:03

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 20 '12 at 06:56

3

How about a string operation? you would to find "v=" and start reading till the next "&" ? that would give you the video id and you can easily create the URL later

answered Jul 20 '12 at 06:56

kommradHomer

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Farid Nouri Neshat · Answer 2 · 2012-07-21T02:50:37.920

0

The following should work:

(&|\?)v=(\w*)(&|$)

It gets whatever starts with & or ?, then the id and then the next & or the end.

I don't know PHP much, but I can see that you are trying to replace strings. That shouldn't work completely. I think what you should do is that get the match with the following and add it to a string to build your own URL.

preg_match('(&|\?)v=(\w*)(&|$)', $url, $matches);
$res = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' + $matches[1]

And then $res will the URL that want.

edited Jul 21 '12 at 02:50

answered Jul 20 '12 at 07:05

Farid Nouri Neshat

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Thanks, could you please tell me inside what part of the regex can i add that? – techAddict82 Jul 20 '12 at 07:54
That's all the regex you need to just get the ID. The ID in this case would be $2. – Farid Nouri Neshat Jul 20 '12 at 08:17
+1 Thank you but if want to add the id to the end of my formatted url something like this: `('(&|\?)v=(\w*)(&|$)','http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$2',$url);` Is this correct? – techAddict82 Jul 20 '12 at 16:08
I don't know PHP much, but I can see that you are trying to replace strings. – Farid Nouri Neshat Jul 21 '12 at 02:40

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

FYI I use this code which works for all of the variations I have been able to find:

    function getYouTubeId($url)
    {
        $pattern = '#^(?:https?://|//)?(?:www\.|m\.)?(?:youtu\.be/|youtube\.com/(?:embed/|v/|watch\?v=|watch\?.+&v=))([\w-]{11})(?![\w-])#';
        preg_match($pattern, $url, $matches);
        return (isset($matches[1])) ? $matches[1] : false;
    }

Tested with these variations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtIMTCHWuI
http://www.youtube.com/v/-wtIMTCHWuI?version=3&autohide=1
http://youtu.be/-wtIMTCHWuI
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-wtIMTCHWuI

Originally found the function from this post a while ago.

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 20 '12 at 07:01

-1

Why don't you just

$url = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=v-feature&v=317a815FLWQ&hello=ok";
$stop = strlen($url);
$pos = strpos($url,'v=')+2;
$x = strpos($url,'&',$pos);
if($x)
    {
    $x = $x - $pos;
    $stop = $x;
    }
$str = substr($url,$pos,$stop);
echo $str;

It basically always starts with a v= ....

answered Jul 20 '12 at 07:01

Tschallacka

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Because not all the YouTube URL variations include "v=" before the video ID. – Mark Stosberg Aug 29 '12 at 19:02

Regex: Stripping ID of Youtube video from URL

4 Answers4