How Can I Extract Video IDs from YouTube URLs?

Extracting Video IDs from YouTube URLs

In scenarios where users provide YouTube video URLs, it becomes necessary to extract the video ID for various functionality. While the YouTube API does not offer a dedicated function for this purpose, alternative approaches are available.

One method involves using a regular expression to parse the URL and isolate the video ID. Here's an example PHP function utilizing this approach:

<code class="php">/**
 * get youtube video ID from URL
 *
 * @param string $url
 * @return string Youtube video id or FALSE if none found.
 */
function youtube_id_from_url($url) {
    $pattern = '%^# Match any youtube URL
    (?:https?://)?  # Optional scheme. Either http or https
    (?:www\.)?      # Optional www subdomain
    (?:             # Group host alternatives
      youtu\.be/    # Either youtu.be,
    | youtube\.com  # or youtube.com
      (?:           # Group path alternatives
        /embed/     # Either /embed/
      | /v/         # or /v/
      | /watch\?v=  # or /watch\?v=
      )             # End path alternatives.
    )               # End host alternatives.
    ([\w-]{10,12})  # Allow 10-12 for 11 char youtube id.
    $%x';
    $result = preg_match($pattern, $url, $matches);
    if ($result) {
        return $matches[1];
    }
    return false;
}</code>

Another option is to leverage YouTube's oEmbed service. While it doesn't directly provide the video ID, it offers additional metadata about the URL. Here's an example using JSON:

<code class="php">$url = 'http://youtu.be/NLqAF9hrVbY';
var_dump(json_decode(file_get_contents(sprintf('http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=%s&amp;format=json', urlencode($url)))));</code>

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