Question

So I’ve got this RSS file that I’m trying to get part of a URL from. So here’s what I tried (which is not working).

I’ve got this URL I can get easily enough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUPjxGmh9i8&feature=youtube_gdata

I tried doing an $link = ltrim($link, 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v='); in PHP and an $link = rtrim($trim, '&feature=youtube_gdata');

And it returned “UPjxGmh9i8”. It cuts off the “t” in the front. The PHP.net documentation pages aren’t the easiest for me to read and interpret, but I’m assuming that any individual character within the second parameter of ltrim() and rtrim() is taken out and this is not what I want. Is there some other solution I can use to grab only the text I want?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This is how I would do it…

$query = parse_url(
            'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUPjxGmh9i8&feature=youtube_gdata', 
            PHP_URL_QUERY);

parse_str($query, $params);

$slug = get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? stripslashes($params['v']) : $params['v'];

CodePad.

The reason trim() (or its variants) won’t work is because it accepts a character list (ordinal not significant), of which http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= contains t. It does not accept a string to remove.