How would you get data from an URL like meta and such and then render in blade?

So my website currently has a social feed which is pretty simple and it's not really advanced. What I want to do next is to add a thing when someone posts an url to like youtube, it would show something like this: http://i.imgur.com/KBpPeUu.png

Like lets say someone wants to post a youtube video like so: [youtube]youtubelinkhere[/youtube]

And then it replaces it with whats in the screenshot? I have the layout and design to that specific "Meta Block", I just don't know how to get the data from the URL?

Thanks

danmatthews

8 years ago

Level 5

Popular websites implement a standard known as oEmbed (open embed). It's essentially an API they provide that allows you to pull information about an entity in a format more suited to displaying how you want, without having to scrape the HTML.

For example, to get info about any youtube video, you can hit the OEMBED API here:

http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=YOUTUBE_URL&format=json

This returns JSON so you can display it however you like:

{
  "title": "A Pep Talk from Kid President to You",
  "type": "video",
  "provider_url": "https://www.youtube.com/",
  "thumbnail_height": 360,
  "version": "1.0",
  "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/user/soulpancake",
  "height": 270,
  "html": "<iframe width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/l-gQLqv9f4o?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen></iframe>",
  "author_name": "SoulPancake",
  "thumbnail_width": 480,
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l-gQLqv9f4o/hqdefault.jpg",
  "width": 480,
  "provider_name": "YouTube"
}

You can see a shed-load of providers here:

http://oembed.com/#section7

Also, there's this package i stumbled across that looks quite neat:

https://github.com/oscarotero/Embed

Good luck!

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