How to validate youtube video ids?

Question

I want to validate youtube video ids sbumitted in the URL to one of my sites before accessing the Youtube API, but I don't know what the allowed characters are in such an id. I see people on the net guessing it can contain numbers and characters, but I haven't yet seen an official specification of these video ids.

Is there one?

Answer 1

I just looks alphanumeric. You might want to look into oEmbed, you can query YouTube to see if the ID is a valid video or not.