Question

I’m working on a project and there is something I can’t quite solve.

Users can add YouTube videos to their profiles by just adding the YouTube clip’s link in a form, E.G:

Youtube link: youtube.com/watch?v=9YgjZ4oPrj4

Now once the user clicks submit the video has to be embedded. The only problem is that I only need this part 9YgjZ4oPrj4 for embedding
(see code below)

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9YgjZ4oPrj4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Now, as you know, YouTube videos have different types of links:

youtube.com/watch?v=9YgjZ4oPrj4
youtu.be/9YgjZ4oPrj4

How do I make this one work?
It’s actually the same as Facebook uses

Answer 1

Here’s some code that will pull the YouTube ID from a string. Note I just copied it from Forrst, but it should do what you want.

function youtube_id($url){
  $url = preg_replace('((http://)?(www\.)?(youtube\.com|youtu\.be)(/v/|/watch\?v=|/)([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)(.*))',"$5",$url);
  return (preg_match('(([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*){11,18})',$url) ? $url : '');
}

The following urls were tested.

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkPgYbdQ1kQ&feature=feedu"
"www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkPgYbdQ1kQ&feature=feedu"
"youtube.com/watch?v=pkPgYbdQ1kQ&feature=feedu"
"http://www.youtube.com/v/pkPgYbdQ1kQ&feature=feedu"
"www.youtube.com/v/pkPgYbdQ1kQ&feature=feedu"
"http://youtu.be/pkPgYbdQ1kQ"
"youtu.be/pkPgYbdQ1kQ"