Youtube Video Id from URL - Swift3

Question

Basically I have a Youtube URL as string, I want to extract the video Id from that URL. I found some code in objective c that is as below:

NSError *error = NULL;         


        

Answer 1

Your first problem is you are not escaping ? in your expression. ? is reserved character and if you want to use it in your expressions, you must escape with \ and since \ is used also to escape " character you must escape ? with double backslash something like \\?. So according to above information, following code correctly extracts the videoId

let youtubeURL = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH8o-JTHJdM"
let regex = try! NSRegularExpression(pattern: "\\?.*v=([^&]+)", options: .caseInsensitive)
let match = regex.firstMatch(in: youtubeURL, options: [], range: NSRange(location: 0, length: youtubeURL.characters.count))
if let videoIDRange = match?.rangeAt(1) {
    let substringForFirstMatch = (youtubeURL as NSString).substring(with: videoIDRange)
} else {
    //NO video URL
}