Question

Among the wall of text that is a pages source; I need to get the video_id,l and t without the quotes so for a section like this.

‘video_id’: ‘lUoiKMxSUCw’, ‘l’: 105, ‘sk’: ‘-2fL6AANk__E49CRzF6_Q8F7yBPWdb9QR’, ‘fmt_map’: ’35/640000/9/0/115,34/0/9/0/115,5/0/7/0/0′, ‘t’: ‘vjVQa1PpcFMbYtdhqxUip5Vtm856lwh7lXZ6lH6nZAg=’,

i need the following

lUoiKMxSUCw

105

vjVQa1PpcFMbYtdhqxUip5Vtm856lwh7lXZ6lH6nZAg=

i was told to use ‘regular expressions’ but I’m not to sure how to use them. any help would be nice 🙂

Answer 1

The Regex to use could be:

\'video_id\':\s*\'(?<videoID>.*?)\'(?:.*?)\'l\':\s*(?<l>.*?),(?:.*?)\'t\':\s*\'(?<t>.*?)\' 

Here’s some sample code to get you up and running:

string sample = '\'video_id\': \'lUoiKMxSUCw\', \'l\': 105, \'sk\': \'-2fL6AANk__E49CRzF6_Q8F7yBPWdb9QR\', \'fmt_map\': \'35/640000/9/0/115,34/0/9/0/115,5/0/7/0/0\', \'t\': \'vjVQa1PpcFMbYtdhqxUip5Vtm856lwh7lXZ6lH6nZAg=\','; string regPattern = '\\\'video_id\\\':\\s*\\\'(?<videoID>.*?)\\\'(?:.*?)\\\'l\\\':\\s*(?<l>.*?),(?:.*?)\\\'t\\\':\\s*\\\'(?<t>.*?)\\\''; Regex reg = new Regex(regPattern, RegexOptions.Singleline); if (reg.IsMatch(sample)) {     Match m = reg.Match(sample);     GroupCollection gColl = m.Groups;     Console.WriteLine('VideoID:{0}', gColl['videoID'].Value);     Console.WriteLine('l:{0}', gColl['l'].Value);     Console.WriteLine('t:{0}', gColl['t'].Value); } 

Don’t forget to import ‘System.Text.RegularExpressions’. 😉