Question

Hi all I have a variable that is a YouTube url that is user-generated. There is a lot of threads on here about Regex and what not, but most are being executed in js. I want to run everything server-side in php, here is my simple function:

function youTubeID($url){
     $url = preg_replace('http://youtu.be/ Regex goes here', '', $url);
     return $url;
}

Markup:

<a href="http://youtu.be/yhXhVMKxnkY"><img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.youTubeID($variable).'/0.jpg" /><img src="play.png" alt="Watch the video" title="Watch the video"/></a>

Question:
Does anyone know the proper regex for http://youtu.be/ ?

I’m sure this is a quick answer, I’m not too savvy with regex. On a side note,does anyone know of any good resources where I can teach myself some good regex so I don’t have to ask silly syntax questions like this? Cheers.

Answer 1

Why use a (relatively slow) RegEx at all?

$url = substr($url, strlen('http://youtu.be/'));

Obviously you have a set start point so no need to calculate it each time you call the function, but doing so here to demonstrate the idea.

Edit:

In case there’s some reason you are required to use a RegEx:

$url = preg_replace('#http\://youtu\.be/#', '', $url);

Cheers