Question

I’ve looked through all the stuff to remove characters from strings but I don’t understand what’s going on here.

I’m using a jQuery script to get videos from a Youtube channel and it displays them with links to the video. On the same page I’ve embedded a video using the iframe code. I set the videos to open in the target which is the iframe. However the URLs don’t work.

• URL it should be: http:// http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID
• URL it currently is: http:// http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&feature=youtube_gdata

(Broken links because new users can’t post more than 2 links)

I need to remove the extra so what I wanted to do was remove http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= from the start and &feature=youtube_gdata from the end then add http://www.youtube.com/embed/ back to the start.

However the link seems to be some sort of event and I just couldn’t work out how to do it.

 + e.link[0].href + 

The above is how the link appears in the javascript.

How can I make the link I need from this?

Thanks very much,
Jack Clarke

Answer 1

You can get the video id out of the old URL and construct a new URL like this:

var origURL = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayYNAEs0few&feature=youtube_gdata";
var matches = origURL.match(/(&|\?)v=([^&]+)/);
var newURL = "http://www.youtube.com/embed/" + matches[2];

// newURL == http://www.youtube.com/embed/ayYNAEs0few

Working example: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/zwcgL/.

Using this technique of extracting the actual video ID from the original URL, you can then construct any type of other URL that uses it with some simple string addition.