Question

I know first off that this is probably the worst looking regex ever but here goes.

I have this regex

(?:http://)?(?:www.)?youtu(?:be)?.(?:[a-z]){2,3}(?:[a-z/?=]+)([a-zA-Z0-9-_]{11})(?:[a-z0-9?&-_=]+)?

which is capable of matching any of these

www.youtu.be/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4&feature=related
http://youtu.be/QH2-TGUlwu4
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4%3Fversion%3D3%26amp%3Bhl%3Den_US

What it does in javascript is tears it apart and just returns the video code.

What I would like to happen is for it to return zero matches if the whole string starts with a double or single quote like so.

“http://youtu.be/QH2-TGUlwu4

Here is where I lose all sense of what I am doing. I know what a negative lookahead is in theory but I found this somewhere else on the site and just plugged it in thinking it would solve problems.

If i put this ^(?!\") before it, it will return zero matches if anything is before the string.

Help?

Answer 1

Get rid of the ^. It’s constraining the match to the beginning of the string.