Question

How can I write a function to check whether the provided URLs is youtube or vimeo?

For instance, I have this two URLs that I store in a database as strings,

http://vimeo.com/24456787

If the URL is youtube then I will rewrite the URL to,

http://www.youtube.com/embed/rj18UQjPpGA?rel=0&wmode=transparent

If the URL is vimeo then I will rewrite this URL to,

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=24456787

Thanks.

Answer 1

As others have noted in the comments, this is a quick and dirty solution that does not handle edge cases well. If the url contains "youtube"(example.com/youtube) it will return a false positive. The parse_url() solution mentioned below is a much more robust solution.

Regular expressions work well for this type of thing, but often strpos or substr are faster performance wise. Check out the PHP documentation for preg_match(). Below the examples there is a note for exactly this thing.

Here is prototype code:

function videoType($url) {
    if (strpos($url, 'youtube') > 0) {
        return 'youtube';
    } elseif (strpos($url, 'vimeo') > 0) {
        return 'vimeo';
    } else {
        return 'unknown';
    }
}

Obviously returning a string isn’t the best idea, but you get the point. Substitute your own business logic.