Improving regex for parsing YouTube / Vimeo URLs

Question

I\'ve made a function (in JavaScript) that takes an URL from either YouTube or Vimeo. It figures out the provider and ID for that particular video (demo: http://jsfiddle.net

Answer 1

3) Your regex does not match https url's. I haven't tested it, but I guess the "http://" part would become "http(s)?://". Note that this would change the matching positions of the provider and id.

Answer 2

Here is my regex

http://jsfiddle.net/csjwf/1/

Answer 3

For Vimeo, Don't rely on Regex as Vimeo tends to change/update their URL pattern every now and then. As of October 2nd, 2017, there are in total of six URL schemes Vimeo supports.

https://vimeo.com/*
https://vimeo.com/*/*/video/*
https://vimeo.com/album/*/video/*
https://vimeo.com/channels/*/*
https://vimeo.com/groups/*/videos/*
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/*/*

Instead, use their API to validate vimeo URLs. Here is this oEmbed (doc) API which takes an URL, checks its validity and return a object with bunch of video information(check out the dev page). Although not intended but we can easily use this to validate whether a given URL is from Vimeo or not.

So, with ajax it would look like this,

var VIMEO_BASE_URL = "https://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=";
var yourTestUrl = "https://vimeo.com/23374724";


$.ajax({
  url: VIMEO_BASE_URL + yourTestUrl,
  type: 'GET',
  success: function(data) {
    if (data != null && data.video_id > 0)
      // Valid Vimeo url
    else
      // not a valid Vimeo url
  },
  error: function(data) {
    // not a valid Vimeo url
  }
});

Answer 4

I had a task to enable adding a dropbox videos. So the same input should take href, check it and transform to the playable link which I can then insert in .

const getPlayableUrl = (url) => {
    // Check youtube and vimeo
    let firstCheck = url.match(/(http:|https:|)\/\/(player.|www.)?(vimeo\.com|youtu(be\.com|\.be|be\.googleapis\.com))\/(video\/|embed\/|watch\?v=|v\/)?([A-Za-z0-9._%-]*)(\&\S+)?/);

    if (firstCheck) {
        if (RegExp.$3.indexOf('youtu') > -1) {
            return "//www.youtube.com/embed/" + RegExp.$6;
        } else if (RegExp.$3.indexOf('vimeo') > -1) {
            return 'https://player.vimeo.com/video/' + RegExp.$6
        }
    } else {
        // Check dropbox
        let candidate = ''
        if (url.indexOf('.mp4') !== -1) {
            candidate = url.slice(0, url.indexOf('.mp4') + 4)
        } else if (url.indexOf('.m4v') !== -1) {
            candidate = url.slice(0, url.indexOf('.m4v') + 4)
        } else if (url.indexOf('.webm') !== -1) {
            candidate = url.slice(0, url.indexOf('.webm') + 5)
        }

        let secondCheck = candidate.match(/(http:|https:|)\/\/(player.|www.)?(dropbox\.com)\/(s\/|embed\/|watch\?v=|v\/)?([A-Za-z0-9._%-]*\/)?(.*)/);
        if (secondCheck) {
            return 'https://dropbox.com/' + RegExp.$4 + RegExp.$5 + RegExp.$6 + '?raw=1'
        } else {
            throw Error("Not supported video resource.");
        }
    }
}

Answer 5

Regex is wonderfully terse but can quickly get complicated.

http://jsfiddle.net/8nagx2sk/

function parseYouTube(str) {
    // link : //youtube.com/watch?v=Bo_deCOd1HU
    // share : //youtu.be/Bo_deCOd1HU
    // embed : //youtube.com/embed/Bo_deCOd1HU

    var re = /\/\/(?:www\.)?youtu(?:\.be|be\.com)\/(?:watch\?v=|embed\/)?([a-z0-9_\-]+)/i; 
    var matches = re.exec(str);
    return matches && matches[1];
}

function parseVimeo(str) {
    // embed & link: http://vimeo.com/86164897

    var re = /\/\/(?:www\.)?vimeo.com\/([0-9a-z\-_]+)/i;
    var matches = re.exec(str);
    return matches && matches[1];
}

Sometimes simple code is nicer to your fellow developers.

https://jsfiddle.net/1dzb5ag1/

// protocol and www neutral
function getVideoId(url, prefixes) {
  var cleaned = url.replace(/^(https?:)?\/\/(www\.)?/, '');
  for(var i = 0; i < prefixes.length; i++) {
    if (cleaned.indexOf(prefixes[i]) === 0)
      return cleaned.substr(prefixes[i].length)
  }
  return undefined;
}

function getYouTubeId(url) {
  return getVideoId(url, [
    'youtube.com/watch?v=',
    'youtu.be/',
    'youtube.com/embed/',
    'youtube.googleapis.com/v/'
  ]);
}

function getVimeoId(url) {
  return getVideoId(url, [
    'vimeo.com/',
    'player.vimeo.com/'
  ]);
}

Which do you prefer to update?