getting the youtube id from a link

Question

I got this code to get the youtube id from the links like www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxx

  URL youtubeURL = new URL(link);
  youtubeURL.getQuery();
         


        

Answer 1

This regex would do the trick:

(?<=videos\/|v=)([\w-]+)

This means that we're first looking for video/ or v= then captures all the following characters that can be in word (letters, digits, and underscores) and hyphens.

Example in java:

public static void main(String[] args) {

    String link = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/xTmi7zzUa-M&whatever";
    String pattern = "(?:videos\\/|v=)([\\w-]+)";

    Pattern compiledPattern = Pattern.compile(pattern);
    Matcher matcher = compiledPattern.matcher(link);

    if(matcher.find()){
        System.out.println(matcher.group());
    }
}

Output:

xTmi7zzUa-M