BetterPHP

Hello

So I want to make it very easy for site visitors to share videos that they find on youtube.
At first I was requiring them to copy and paste the embed code and the video url(for like buttons)
I feel that it's a little to much for them and most of the time they mess up.

Now I want to store only the url but the most important aspect of the url is the variable "v".

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y

The important piece is ?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y
unfortunately when that variable is stored inside the database I don't know how to grab the ?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y
part which is needed for thumbnails.

My question is... how can I store the video url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y inside the database
and later grab the ?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y part only.

(just entering in ?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y is not a solution for other reasons)

So what you want is the actual video id?

if so, here's my solution:

<?php
$var = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccT8C2wSC6Y";

$array = explode("?",$var);

$var2 = substr($array[1], 2);

echo $var2;

/Edit; This will obviously only work if the input string always looks the same. If your users copy and paste a link from a playlist or anything else that changes the URL you would need to disallow that.


/Edit2; I did some more thinking and this is what I came up with.

<?php
$var = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QktSpv6f ... ucpOmXccJP";

$array = explode("v=",$var);

$var2 = $array[1];

$array2 = explode("&",$var2);

echo $array2[0];

this will allow for any url input and will always pick the $_GET'['v'] variable.

Thanks worked like a charm

There are better ways of doing this.
I'm guessing you could use regex to do this too, but my belief is that regex syntax is the devil, so I haven't bothered learning it.

There are better ways of doing this.
I'm guessing you could use regex to do this too, but my belief is that regex syntax is the devil, so I haven't bothered learning it.