RegEx pattern to get the YouTube video ID from any YouTube URL

Question

Let\'s take these URLs as an example:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GqqjVXhfMU&feature=youtube_gdata_player
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gqqj

Answer 1

Instead of regex. I hightly recommend parse_url() and parse_str():

$url = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GqqjVXhfMU&feature=youtube_gdata_player";
parse_str(parse_url( $url, PHP_URL_QUERY ), $vars );
echo $vars['v'];    

Done