Question

I want to check if an given URL a is link to http://youtube.com.

I know there are lots of various shortened version’s of the links (e.g. http://youtu.be), so what I am after is a way to resolve the URL and see if it ends up as http://youtube.com.

A couple of example inputs are:

http://www.youtube.com/v/[videoid]
http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=[videoid]

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

Answer 1

You could perform a HEAD request:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.youtu.be/Ddn4MGaS3N4");
request.Method = "HEAD";
using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse()) {
    Console.WriteLine("Does this resolve to youtube?: {0}", response.ResponseUri.ToString().Contains("youtube.com") ? "Yes" : "No");
}

Appears to work fine. Unsure of edge cases but seems to do the job.

(Note: No error checking here such as 404 errors, etc).