Question

I have a regular expression that I have written in order to extract values that a user enters and replace some height and width values and keep the urls. This is so it can be safely added to a database.

This is what I have so far (just trying to get the preg_match to return a TRUE value)

$test ='<object height="81" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Ftheshiverman%2Fsummer-beats-july-2010&secret_url=false"></param> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param> <embed allowscriptaccess="always" height="81" src="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Ftheshiverman%2Fsummer-beats-july-2010&secret_url=false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%"></embed> </object>'; 
  if (preg_match('/<object height=\"[0-9]*\" width=\"[0-9]*\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"(.*)\"><\/param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"><\/param><embed allowscriptaccess=\"always\" height=\"[0-9]*\" src=\".*\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"100%\"><\/embed><\/object>/', $test)) {

$embed = $test;

} else {

$embed = 'FALSE';

}

I seem to have done something wrong in the validation, as it always returns false.

Answer 1

If what you want to do is allow the user to give you SoundCloud embeds while you retain the rights to style the players, you might want to look into oEmbed which is well supported by SoundCloud (see here) and other parties. This way, users just enter their normal track URLs and you can resolve those in the backend as you see fit.

Also, keep in mind that an embed code with a different order of <param>‘s is still a valid embed code but would be very difficult to match with a regex