Youtube Video ID From URL - Objective C

Question

I basically have a Youtube url as an NSString, but I need to extract the video id that is displayed in the url. I found many tutorials on how to do this in php or and other

Answer 1

The tutorials you are probably seeing are just instructions on how to use regular expressions, which is also what you want to use in this case.

The Cocoa class you will need to use is NSRegularExpression.

Your actual regex string will depend on the format you are expecting the url to be in since it looks like youtube has several. The general function will look something like:

+ (NSString *)extractYoutubeID:(NSString *)youtubeURL
{
  NSError *error = NULL;  
  NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"your regex string goes here" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:&error];
  NSRange rangeOfFirstMatch = [regex rangeOfFirstMatchInString:youtubeURL options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [youtubeURL length])];
  if(!NSEqualRanges(rangeOfFirstMatch, NSMakeRange(NSNotFound, 0)))
  {
    NSString *substringForFirstMatch = [youtubeURL substringWithRange:rangeOfFirstMatch];

    return substringForFirstMatch;
  }
  return nil;
}