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

There is a lot of good answers here but I thought it might be beneficial to some to parse multiple video_ID from a string. This could be a web page or an array of different URL.

Example of page content

NSString *content = @"http://www.youtube.com/user/Scobleizer#p/u/1/1p3vcRhsYGo,http://youtu.be/NLqAF9hrVbY,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLqAF9hrVbY,http://facebook.com,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAcqdjLCN7s";

Method

-(NSArray *)extractVideos:(NSString *)content {
    NSString *extractRegex = @"(?<=v(=|/))([-a-zA-Z0-9_]+)|(?<=youtu.be/)([-a-zA-Z0-9_]+)"
    NSMutableArray *extractedContent = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
    if ([content hasPrefix:@"http://"] || [content hasPrefix:@"https://"]) {
        NSURL *extractURL = [NSURL URLWithString:content];
        if ([extractURL.host rangeOfString:@"youtu"].location != NSNotFound) {
            NSRegularExpression *extractRegex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:extractRegex options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:nil];
            NSArray *extractResults = [extractRegex matchesInString:content options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, content.length)];
            for (NSTextCheckingResult *match in extractResults) {
                [extractedContent addObject:[content substringWithRange:match.range]];

            }

        }

    }

    return extractedContent;

}

Output

( 
    NLqAF9hrVbY,
    QLqAF9eeVbY,
    cAcqdjLCN7s
)

Credit to @Alex for the Regex