Parsing a Vimeo ID using Javascript?

Question

Hi,

Could anyone point me in the right direction to parse an ID from a Vimeo URL in Javascript?

The URL will be entered by a user so I will need to check that they have entered it in the correct format.

I need the ID so that I can use their simple API to retrieve video data.

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

Sure.

You should first check the validity/sanity of the URL with a regex and make sure it matches the pattern you expect. (More about regex'es here)

Next you need that ID number, right? Assuming that it's located within the URL, you can extract that also using a regex (backreference)

It's all just basically string and regex handling.

Answer 2

update: if you want to check for vimeo url first:

function getVimeoId(url) {
  if(url.toLowerCase().indexOf('vimeo') > 0) {
    var re = new RegExp('/[0-9]+', "g");
    var match = re.exec(url);
    if (match == null) {
       return false;
    } else {
       return match[0].substring(1);
    }
  }
  return false;
}

E.g.

alert( getVimeoId( "http://vimeo.com/11918221") );

displays

11918221

Answer 3

As urls for Vimeo videos are made up by http://vimeo.com/ followed by the numeric id you could do the following

var url = "http://www.vimeo.com/7058755";
var regExp = /http:\/\/(www\.)?vimeo.com\/(\d+)($|\/)/;

var match = url.match(regExp);

if (match){
    alert("id: " + match[2]);
}else{
    alert("not a vimeo url");
}