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How can I use Regex to find the ID in a YouTube link?

When I try to extract this video ID (AIiMa2Fe-ZQ) using a regex expression, I cannot get the dash all the letters after.

>>> id = re.search('(?<=\?v\=)\w+', 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIiMa2Fe-ZQ')
>>> print id.group(0)
>>> AIiMa2Fe
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6 answers


I don't know the pattern for youtube hashes, but I just included "-" in the capabilities as it is not considered alpha:

import re
id = re.search('(?<=\?v\=)[\w-]+', 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIiMa2Fe-ZQ')
print id.group(0)

I edited the above because as it turns out:



>>> re.search("[\w|-]", "|").group(0)
'|'

"|" in character definition does not act as a special character, but does match "|" trumpet. My apologies.

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The interactivity of \ w + is used below. The word character (\ w) does not include a dash. It only includes [a-zA-Z_0-9].



[\w-]+
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>>> re.search('(?<=v=)[\w-]+', 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIiMa2Fe-ZQ').group()
'AIiMa2Fe-ZQ'

\w

is the shorthand for [a-zA-Z0-9_]

in python2.x, you will have to use a flag re.A

in py3k. You pretty clearly have an extra character in this video, like a hyphen. I also removed the extra backslash with lookbehind.

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/(?:/v/|/watch\?v=|/watch#!v=)([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/

Explain RE

There are three alternative YouTube formats: /v/[ID]

and the watch?v=

new AJAX- watch#!v=

This RE captures all three. Also there is a new YouTube url for custom pages which is of the form / user / [user]? Content = {complex URI} This is not captured by any regex here ...

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Use urlparse module instead of regex for things like this.

import urlparse

parsed_url = urlparse.urlparse(url)
if parsed_url.netloc.find('youtube.com') != -1 and parsed_url.path == '/watch':
    video = urlparse.parse_qs(parsed_url.query).get('v', None)

    if video is None:
        video = urlparse.parse_qs(parsed_url.fragment.strip('!')).get('v', None)

    if video is not None:
        print video[0]

EDIT: Updated for the new youtube url format.

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I would try this:

>>> import re
>>> a = re.compile(r'.*(\-\w+)$')
>>> a.search('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIiMa2Fe-ZQ').group(1)
'-ZQ'
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