Output YouTube Subscriber Number - ScreenScrape?

[effortless]

Hey guys,


I work heavily on YouTube and simply need to grab my subscriber count and display it externally.

I assume PHP can help me with this.

Could anyone tell a PHP newb how to simply display this on a page?


Any help much appreciated, thanks.

[AnthonySterling]

Check out the API.

I'm not at my workstation at the moment, so have no access to an IDE, but it should go something along the lines of...

<?php
function getYouTubeSubscriberCount($user)
{
    $data = file_get_contents(sprintf('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/%s', $user));
    $matches = array();
    preg_match('~subscriberCount="(?<count>\d)"~', $data, $matches);
    return isset($matches[0]['count']) ? $matches[0]['count'] : false ;
}
echo getYouTubeSubscriberCount('sonybmg'); #181218
?>

Off Topic:


Edit: Just for reference, I didn't use native XML objects as I have no IDE and no memory...

[effortless]

I put that into a .php file, and uploaded, and its blank

On the YouTube API PHP area on This Page, under the "Retrieving a user's profile" shows subscribers. How would I put this into a .php file?

[AnthonySterling]

Ah, tell you what, I'll have another stab at it. Bear in mind though, you should probably be using SimpleXML or DOM to parse the response properly.

<?php
function getYouTubeSubscriberCount($user)
{
    $data = file_get_contents(sprintf('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/%s', $user));
    $matches = array();
    preg_match("~subscriberCount='(?<count>\d+)'~", $data, $matches);
    return isset($matches['count']) ? $matches['count'] : 0 ;
}
echo getYouTubeSubscriberCount('sonybmg'); #181218
?>

[sk89q]

You can also use this: http://framework.zend.com/download/gdata/

Disclaimer: I haven't used it myself.

[Salathe]

You can also get at the data in JSON format:

$name = 'sitepoint';
$url   = sprintf('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/%s?alt=json', urlencode($name));
$json  = @file_get_contents($url); // Naughty @-operator, use proper error handling
$data  = json_decode($json, TRUE);
$count = (int) $data['entry']['yt$statistics']['subscriberCount'];

echo $count;