Question

Here is an example of url structure I’ll be working with (ignore the age of electric video 🙂 )

http://www.youtube.com/embed/ABCumLrphFA?&start=20&end=50

Basically I want to be able to grab the video id, the chosen start time (20) and end chosen time (50) and save them as variables from any URL that follows the pattern above.

So a simple setup is this:

var url = 'http://www.youtube.com/embed/ABCumLrphFA?&start=20&end=50'

// get youtube id
function youtubeid(url) {
    var ytid = url.match(dont know);
    ytid = ytid[1];
    return ytid;
}
// get youtube start time
function youtubeStart(url) {
    var ytStart = url.match(dont know);
    ytStart=ytStart[1];
    return ytStart;
}
// get youtube end time
function youtubeEnd(url) {
    var ytEnd = url.match(dont know);
    ytEnd=ytEnd[1];
    return ytEnd;
}

If you could help me fill in the blanks that would be most amazing. I’ve been staring at regex documentation for a while now and just getting more and more confused.

Answer 1

This other Stack Overflow answer may help you. I used Peter Mortensen’s answer below.

• Get query string values in JavaScript

To obtain the actual YouTube Id, you can use this regular expression:

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/(.{11})

That regex will return the value in parenthesis. You can test it here:

• http://www.pagecolumn.com/tool/regtest.htm

Sample code:

var url = 'http://www.youtube.com/embed/ABCumLrphFA?&start=20&end=50'

// get youtube id
function youtubeid(url) {
    var ytid = url.match(/http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/(.{11})/);
    ytid = ytid[1];
    return ytid;
}
alert(youtubeid(url));

function getParameterByName(name, url) {
    var match = RegExp('[?&]' + name + '=([^&]*)')
                    .exec(url);
    return match && decodeURIComponent(match[1].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
}

alert(getParameterByName('start', url));
alert(getParameterByName('end', url));