get video from content

Question

I have a post with YouTube video in it. The content is inside $content. Currently I am doing the_content() and this displays full content on my page. The page contains the list of all videos. The problem is that sometimes the full content is too large to display in this list. So I want to limit the text in the content, but then still want show the first video:

I want to

1. get text: take first 200 characters from the content, but without including video
2. get video: take just video link and show YouTube video under the text

I am not sure how to archive this. Probably, I would have to use some Regexp and probably I can invent the wheel by my self, but I believe that there should be something already done in WordPress. As I am quite new in WP, I have not found anything yet.

Answer 1

Assuming your content is in the variable $content you would begin by removing all html tags using wp_strip_all_tags:

$new_content = wp_strip_all_tags( $content );

Then you will want to trim that to 200 characters using substr:

$new_content = substr( $new_content, 0, 200 );

To retrieve the YouTube video, you'll need to use preg_match:

preg_match( '/(<iframe.*?src="(.*?youtube.*?)".*?<\/iframe>)/', $html, $matches );
if ( $matches ) {
  $iframe = $matches[1];
  $url = $matches[2];
}

(I wasn't sure whether you wanted the iframe for embedding, or the src URL, so I've included matching for both.)