parse youtube video id using preg_match

J.C picture J.C · May 29, 2010 · Viewed 68.6k times · Source

I am attempting to parse the video ID of a youtube URL using preg_match. I found a regular expression on this site that appears to work;

(?<=v=)[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?=&)|(?<=[0-9]/)[^&\n]+|(?<=v=)[^&\n]+

As shown in this pic:

alt text

My PHP is as follows, but it doesn't work (gives Unknown modifier '[' error)...

<?
 $subject = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_AbfPXTKms&NR=1";

 preg_match("(?<=v=)[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(?=&)|(?<=[0-9]/)[^&\n]+|(?<=v=)[^&\n]+", $subject, $matches);

 print "<pre>";
 print_r($matches);
 print "</pre>";

?>

Cheers

Answer

Benjam picture Benjam · Jun 17, 2011

This regex grabs the ID from all of the various URLs I could find... There may be more out there, but I couldn't find reference of them anywhere. If you come across one this doesn't match, please leave a comment with the URL, and I'll try and update the regex to match your URL.

if (preg_match('%(?:youtube(?:-nocookie)?\.com/(?:[^/]+/.+/|(?:v|e(?:mbed)?)/|.*[?&]v=)|youtu\.be/)([^"&?/\s]{11})%i', $url, $match)) {
    $video_id = $match[1];
}

Here is a sample of the URLs this regex matches: (there can be more content after the given URL that will be ignored)

It also works on the youtube-nocookie.com URL with the same above options.

It will also pull the ID from the URL in an embed code (both iframe and object tags)