Hey everyone, I’m working on a project where users can input URLs. I need to figure out how to check if these URLs are valid for downloading content from sites that youtube-dl supports. Does anyone know a good way to do this?
I’ve been scratching my head over this for a while now. I was thinking maybe there’s a built-in function or method in youtube-dl that can help, but I’m not sure. Or maybe I need to create a list of supported domains and check against that?
Any tips or code snippets would be super helpful. I’m using Python for this project, if that makes a difference. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
I’ve dealt with a similar issue in one of my projects. While youtube-dl doesn’t have a built-in function for URL validation, you can leverage its extractor classes. Here’s what worked for me:
Import youtube_dl and use the YoutubeDL class. Create an instance with the ‘quiet’ option set to True to suppress output. Then, call the extract_info method with the URL and ‘download=False’. If it doesn’t raise an exception, the URL is likely valid for youtube-dl.
Keep in mind this method might be a bit slow for real-time checking. As an alternative, you could maintain a list of supported domains from youtube-dl’s source code and do a quick check against that first. It’s not foolproof, but it’s faster and covers most cases.
Hope this helps with your project!
hey zack, have u tried using the extractors module from youtube_dl? it’s got a list of supported sites. u could loop thru that and check if the domain matches. not perfect but pretty quick. might need to update it sometimes tho. good luck w/ ur project!