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While making the YouTube Music in MySpace tool, I coudln’t find a function that reads an input URL then makes an array with the GET variable names and values. I needed this to get the video id from the YouTube video URL - so I made it, and now I’m sharing it.

So in my case, the function is fed a YouTube URL and returns the video id variable (v) - So an example:
Input: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=le860Jd-FqI&feature=related
Output:
$output['v'] = “le860Jd-FqI”
$output['feature'] = “related”

And so witout further ado, here’s the actual code:

function getVariableFromUrl($url) {		//we need to see if this URL is passing any GET variables

 	$variablesStart = strpos($url, "?") + 1;

if (!$variablesStart) {

 		// no variables!

 		return(false);

 	}

//before we extract the variables, we need to remove any anchors

$variablesEnd = strpos($url,"#",$variablesStart);

if ($variablesEnd) {

 		$getVariables = substr($url, $variablesStart, $variablesEnd - $variablesStart);

 	} else {

 		$getVariables = substr($url, $variablesStart);

 	}

//next, we split the URL into an arrays containing variable name and value pairs (ie. "variable=value")

 	$variableArray = explode("&", $getVariables);

//we will iterate through each of the array pairs (ie. "variable=value")

 	foreach ($variableArray as $arraySet) {

$nameAndValue = explode("=", $arraySet);

//using the above examples, $nameAndValue[0] would be “variable” and $nameAndValue[1] would be “value”

 		$output[$nameAndValue[0]] = $nameAndValue[1];

}

return($output);

}

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.