Extract YouTube video identifier using PHP regular expressions

Other Questions YouTube
1

I’m trying to figure out how to grab the YouTube video ID from a URL using PHP regex. The tricky part is that the URL might have different query parameters. Here’s what I mean:

For instance, take this URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABC123XYZ&feature=trending

I want to get the part after v= but before the next & (if there is one). In this case, it would be ABC123XYZ.

Can anyone help me craft a regex pattern that works for various YouTube URL formats? I’ve been scratching my head over this for a while now. Thanks in advance for any pointers or code examples!

2

In my experience, relying on PHP’s built-in functions is often more maintainable than crafting complex regex patterns for YouTube URLs. Rather than struggling with regex for every potential URL variation, I prefer using parse_url to extract the components and then parse_str to turn the query string into an array. Once you have the array, you can easily extract the ‘v’ parameter. This method tends to handle edge cases better than regex, and it makes your code more robust and easier to update if the URL scheme changes.