C# regex to get video id from youtube and vimeo by url

Question

I'm busy trying to create two regular expressions to filter the id from youtube and vimeo video's. I've already got the following expressions;

YouTube: (youtube\.com/)(.*)v=([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)
Vimeo: vimeo\.com/([0-9]+)$

As i explained below there are 2 types of urls matched by the regular expressions i already created. Several other types of urls from Vimeo and YouTube aren't coverd by the expressions. What i prefer most is that all this can be covered in two expressions. One for all Vimeo video's and one for all youtube video's. I've been busy experimenting with some different expressions, but no succes so far. I'm still trying to master regular expressions, so i hope i'm on the right way and somebody can help me out! If more information is required, please let me know!

VIMEO URLs NOT MATCHED:

http://vimeo.com/channels/hd#11384488
http://vimeo.com/groups/brooklynbands/videos/7906210
http://vimeo.com/staffpicks#13561592

YOUTUBE URLs NOT MATCHED

http://www.youtube.com/user/username#p/a/u/1/bpJQZm_hkTE
http://www.youtube.com/v/bpJQZm_hkTE
http://youtu.be/bpJQZm_hkTE

URLs Matched

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWTyFIYPtYU&feature=popular
http://vimeo.com/834881

The idea is to match all the url's mentioned above with two regular expressions. One for vimeo and one for youtube.

UPDATE AFTER ANSWER Sedith:

This is how my expressions look now

public static readonly Regex VimeoVideoRegex = new Regex(@"vimeo\.com/(?:.*#|.*/videos/)?([0-9]+)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline);
public static readonly Regex YoutubeVideoRegex = new Regex(@"youtu(?:\.be|be\.com)/(?:(.*)v(/|=)|(.*/)?)([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

And in code i have

var youtubeMatch = url.match(YoutubeVideoRegex );
var vimeoMatch = url.match(VimeoVideoRegex );

var youtubeIndex = (youtubeMatch.length - 1)
var youtubeId = youtubeMatch[youtubeIndex];

As you can see i now need to find the index where the videoId is in the array with matches returned from the regex. But i want it to only return the id itselfs, so i don't need to modify the code when youtube of vimeo ever decide to change there urls. Any tips on this?

Septih · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-07T08:44:19.670

65

I had a play around with the examples and came up with these:

Youtube: youtu(?:\.be|be\.com)/(?:.*v(?:/|=)|(?:.*/)?)([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)
Vimeo: vimeo\.com/(?:.*#|.*/videos/)?([0-9]+)

And they should match all those given. The (?: ...) means that everything inside the bracket won't be captured. So only the id should be obtained.

I'm a bit of a regex novice myself, so don't be surprised if someone else comes in here screaming not to listen to me, but hopefully these will be of help.

I find this website extremely useful in working out the patterns: http://www.regexpal.com/

Edit:

get the id like so:

string url = ""; //url goes here!

Match youtubeMatch = YoutubeVideoRegex.Match(url);
Match vimeoMatch = VimeoVideoRegex.Match(url);

string id = string.Empty;

if (youtubeMatch.Success)
    id = youtubeMatch.Groups[1].Value; 

if (vimeoMatch.Success)
    id = vimeoMatch.Groups[1].Value;

That works in plain old c#.net, can't vouch for asp.net

edited Sep 07 '10 at 08:44

answered Sep 06 '10 at 15:08

Septih

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Thanks! I've tried the expressions and the work perfectly, but while i was testing i found out it's more convenient to only get the part of the url containing the video id, is this possible? – Rob Sep 07 '10 at 06:55
2

See above changes. The youtube pattern was slightly wrong but now both of them should have the id captured in match.Groups[1].Value – Septih Sep 07 '10 at 08:45
Thanks for the good response! I'll try this out first thing tomorromorning, and i'll let you know! – Rob Sep 07 '10 at 14:49
Thanks it's all working like a charm now! Definately learned something about regexes. – Rob Sep 08 '10 at 07:26
6

For some reason when I try it, the video ID is in match.Groups[4].Value rather than [1]. Any idea why? (C# .NET 4). I get the same if I test it here: http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/09/a-better-dotnet-regular-expression-tester.ashx – NickG Jun 28 '11 at 16:53
I also had to change it to match.Groups[4] rather than [1], but aside from that minor change, it works great for me, thanks. – marcusstarnes Jul 21 '11 at 10:04
1

Putting this one into production made me look good - many thanks :-) – Evan Harper Feb 29 '12 at 16:31
tested the youtube regex against https://regex101.com/ and it fell over the slashes " / " that weren't escaped so you might want to escape them with a backslash " \/ " – Thomas Mulder Jan 22 '16 at 11:58

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 17 '16 at 16:30

In case you are writing some application with view model (e.g. ASP.NET MVC):

public string YouTubeUrl { get; set; }

public string YouTubeVideoId
{
    get
    {
        var youtubeMatch =
            new Regex(@"youtu(?:\.be|be\.com)/(?:.*v(?:/|=)|(?:.*/)?)([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)")
            .Match(this.YouTubeUrl);
        return youtubeMatch.Success ? youtubeMatch.Groups[1].Value : string.Empty;
    }
}

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 23 '12 at 10:04

0

Vimeo:

vimeo\.com/(?:.*#|.*/)?([0-9]+)

edited Sep 23 '12 at 10:04

j0k

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answered Sep 19 '12 at 00:11

deype0

147
2
4

C# regex to get video id from youtube and vimeo by url

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