Youtube Thumbnails for Video module (parsing xml help)

By mudanoman on 21 Jul 2006 at 02:52 UTC

Hello,

I would like to try to add automatic youtube thumbnailing for the video module when a user submits a youtube video. I am stuck on how to parse the thumbnail url (
URL) in the XML file. Here is an example of the xml file: http://www.youtube.com/api2_rest?method=youtube.videos.get_details&dev_i... . There seems like there are multiple ways to do this, but what is the most effective assuming I just want to extract just the thumbnail url from the xml file. Any help much appreciated.

TIA,

Ivan

Comments

You don't have to parse the

erdemkose commented 21 July 2006 at 07:20

You don't have to parse the whole XML. Just find the position of <thumbnail_url> and </thumbnail_url>. So you can get the URL by using substr function.


$youtube_XML = getXMLofYouTube();

$begin = strpos($youtube_XML, '<thumbnail_url>');
$end = strpos($youtube_XML, '</thumbnail_url>', $begin);

if( $begin !== FALSE && $end !== FALSE ) {
  // numbers may be wrong, change them if you get wrong URL.
  $thumbnail_url = substr( $youtube_XML, $begin+15, $end-$begin-15 );
}

You can also use Regular Expression. RegExp has less code but it may be slower.


if (preg_match('/<thumbnail_url>([^<]*)<\/thumbnail_url>/', getXMLofYouTube(), $matches)) {
  $thumbnail_url = $matches[1];
}
else {
  //no thumbnail URL
}

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