Get the Youtube Video Thumbnail from Youtube video Url using PHP

Question

Lets say I have a youtube video url www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU&feature=youtube_gdata&par1=1&par2=2

I want to get the video thumbnail -> i3.ytimg.com/vi/B4CRkpBGQzU/default.jpg I just need a simple php script that I will input the $url and get the $img If posible I would like to strip all other parameters and be left with just the www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU as the $url

Answer 1

To extract the identifier from the following URL :

$url = 'www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU&feature=youtube_gdata&par1=1&par2=2';

You can first use parse_url() to get the query string :

$queryString = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY);
var_dump($queryString);

Which, here, would give you :

string 'v=B4CRkpBGQzU&feature=youtube_gdata&par1=1&par2=2' (length=49)

And, then, use parse_str() to extract the parameters from that query string :

parse_str($queryString, $params);
var_dump($params);

Which would get you the following array :

array
  'v' => string 'B4CRkpBGQzU' (length=11)
  'feature' => string 'youtube_gdata' (length=13)
  'par1' => string '1' (length=1)
  'par2' => string '2' (length=1)

And, now, it's just a matter of using the v item from that array, injecting it into the thumbnail URL :

if (isset($params['v'])) {
    echo "i3.ytimg.com/vi/{$params['v']}/default.jpg";
}

Which gives :

i3.ytimg.com/vi/B4CRkpBGQzU/default.jpg

Answer 2

<?php
        function getYoutubeImage($e){
        //GET THE URL
        $url = $e;

        $queryString = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY);

        parse_str($queryString, $params);

        $v = $params['v'];  
        //DISPLAY THE IMAGE
        if(strlen($v)>0){
            echo "<img src='http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/$v/default.jpg' width='150' />";
        }
    }
?>

<?php
    getYoutubeImage("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXWSlho1mMY&feature=plcp");
?>