Javascript regular expression for extracting Youtube video ids

Question

The following code is used to get Youtube video ids in order to get a thumbnail image.

What is the reasoning behind the first regular expression and what is it doing

Answer 1

Ok, I did some fishing around and came accross this regex. It should suit the purpose described above.

youtu(?:\.be|be\.com)/(?:.*v(?:/|=)|(?:.*/)?)([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)

From: C# regex to get video id from youtube and vimeo by url

And: http://forrst.com/posts/Automatic_YouTube_Thumbnails_with_PHP_and_Regex-uta

Answer 2

"[\\?&]v=([^&#]*)"

explained (after reduction from a JavaScript string to a regex):

[\?&]   # Match a ? or a & (the backslash is unnecessary here!)
v=      # Match the literal text "v="
(       # Capture the following into backreference no. 1:
 [^&#]* # Zero or more characters except & or #
)       # End of capturing group.

The second regex [^http://youtu.be/](.*)[^?hd=1] is very wrong.

It probably should read

"^http://youtu.be/(.*)(?=hd=1)"

Answer 3

The 1st regex is checking for "?v=GItD10Joaa0" when the url is something like "youtube.com/" and the 2nd is checking for "www.youtube.com/index?feature=youtu.be" when the url is "http://www.youtube.com/index?feature=youtu.be"

So you can simply use the 1st regex if you want to get ids from 1st url and likewise :)

Answer 4

If you are referring to...

results = url.match("[\\?&]v=([^&#]*)");

Then it is matching a literal \, ? or & followed by literal v= followed by a capturing group which is capturing 0 or more of any characters that are not & or #.