Question

Had a look round but couldn’t find a working (and recent) solution for this.

Using an API I am receiving a string like this:

<object width="600" height="338">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ItT88H3nAWw?version=3&feature=oembed"></param>
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ItT88H3nAWw?version=3&feature=oembed" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="600" height="338" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
</object>

What would be a regular expression in PHP to extract just the video id? e.g. ItT88H3nAWw

Answer 1

Get src param from embed tag WITHOUT regexp. Then parse it in following way:

$youtubeUrl = 'http://www.youtube.com/v/ItT88H3nAWw?version=3&feature=oembed';

if ( preg_match('youtube\.\w+.*?v[/=](\w+)', $youtubeUrl, $matches) ) {
  $youtubeId = $matches[1];
}

This regexp will handle both:

• http://www.youtube.com/v/ItT88H3nAWw
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItT88H3nAWw

To convert HTML string to an object use SimpleXMLElement.

$obj = new SimpleXMLElement($htmlCode);
$youtubeUrl = $obj->embed->src;