I would like to search youtube with a string, and get the id for the top video in the search result, so I can directly play that video on my website. Is this possible?
I only have the url for searching: youtube_url/results?search_query=thevideotitlehere
Should I use javascript/jquery/php/youtube-api?
I would like to search youtube with a string, and get the id for the top video in the search result, so I can directly play that video on my website. Is this possible?
I only have the url for searching: youtube_url/results?search_query=thevideotitlehere
Should I use javascript/jquery/php/youtube-api?
Share Improve this question asked Jun 7, 2014 at 23:23 mowglimowgli 2,8694 gold badges34 silver badges69 bronze badges 2-
Is this possible?..did you try it? WHere are your code attampts? What were your findings? – charlietfl Commented Jun 7, 2014 at 23:34 - 1 Did I try what? I said "I only have the url".. I have been googling for a day, without ing much closer – mowgli Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 9:42
3 Answers
Reset to default 3I'm not formilliar with the Youtube api. But I had to do something simular a while ago so I'm going to use the same approach here.
The idea is simple. First obviously we get the search string from the visitor. Than we build up a correct Youtube link. Using file_get_contents we fetch the source from the link. With a bit of regex we search for the first video id occurence inside this source and save it inside a variable.
Now all we have to do is output a standard Youtube embedding with the video id we fetched earlier.
I'm sure there are better ways to do this though.
<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit']) && $_POST['submit'] != ''){
$searchString = $_POST['searchString'];
$correctString = str_replace(" ","+",$searchString);
$youtubeUrl = "https://www.youtube./results?search_query=". $correctString;
$getHTML = file_get_contents($youtubeUrl);
$pattern = '/<a href="\/watch\?v=(.*?)"/i';
if(preg_match($pattern, $getHTML, $match)){
$videoID = $match[1];
} else {
echo "Something went wrong!";
exit;
}
echo '<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube./embed/'. $videoID .'" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>';
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>Fetch Youtube first result</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="index.php" accept-charset="utf-8">
Search string: <input type="text" name="searchString" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Search" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
After many hours of searching, coding and trying, I have a solution
Use YouTube API, in a very simple way
Enable google youtube API and setup an API key
Then use this to get the id of the top video in a search (I'm using PHP, but I bet you could use something like JavaScript or others too):
<?php
$yt_search = 'Godzilla trailer 2014';
$yt_source = file_get_contents('https://www.googleapis./youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&maxResults=1&order=relevance&q='.urlencode($yt_search).'&key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE');
$yt_decode = json_decode($yt_source, true);
if ($yt_decode['pageInfo']['totalResults']>0) {
if (strlen($yt_decode['items'][0]['id']['videoId'])>5) {
$yt_videoid = trim($yt_decode['items'][0]['id']['videoId']);
echo $yt_videoid;
}
}
?>
This works:
youtube_url/embed/?listType=search&list=SEARCHWORD&autoplay=1
But it does not autoplay