Question

So I’m working with some pretty awesome HTML strings stored in our DB and I need to be able to parse out the string between the “forum-style” youtube tags as in the example below. I have a solution, but it feels a bit hackish. I’m thinking there’s probably a more elegant way to handle this problem.

<?php

    $video_string = '<p><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;">[youtube]KbI_7IHAsyw[/youtube]<br /></span></span></p>';

    $matches = array();
    preg_match('/\][_A-Za-z0-9]+\[/', $video_string, $matches);

    $yt_vid_key = substr($matches[0], 1, strlen($matches[0]) - 2 );

Answer 1

I’d change the regex a bit:

    '/\[youtube\](.*?)\[\/youtube\]/is'

Adding the ‘youtube’ part to not replace ALL bb-codes – only the right ones.
I’ve also added the ‘?’ to make the regex less greedy (incase there are multiple YT videos in one post.
I added the pattern modifiers i and s, to be able to match case-insensitive and multiline strings.

Edit:
You may also rather want to use preg_replace, it’ll be a bit less code that way.