Regex - Extract TwitterUsername from URL - regex

Question

I'm looking for an universal regular expression which extracts the twitter username from an url.
Sample URLS
http://www.twitter.com/#!/donttrythis
http://twitter.com/KimKardashian
http://www.twitter.com/#!/KourtneyKardash/following
http://twitter.com/#!/jasonterry31/lists/memberships

Answer 1

There are a couple more test cases to make a universal regexp.
https URLs are also valid
URLs like twitter.com/#username also go to username's profile
This should do the trick in PHP
preg_match("|https?://(www\.)?twitter\.com/(#!/)?#?([^/]*)|", $twitterUrl, $matches);
If preg_match returns 1 (a match) then the result is on $matches[3]

Answer 2

Try this:
^https?://(www\.)?twitter\.com/(#!/)?(?<name>[^/]+)(/\w+)*$
The sub group "name" will contain the twitter username.
This regex assumes that each URL is on its own line.
To use it in JS, use this:
^https?://(www\.)?twitter\.com/(#!/)?([^/]+)(/\w+)*$
The result is in the sub group $3.

Answer 3

this regex works fine in jQuery
$('#inputTwitter').blur(function() {
var twitterUserName = $(this).val();
$(this).val(twitterUserName.match(/https?:\/\/(www\.)?twitter\.com\/(#!\/)?#?([^\/]*)/)[3])
});

Answer 4

This one is based on Lombo's answer, works without http(s) too, is less hungry (not keeping spaces after the username) and returns first in the result.
Check it in action: https://regex101.com/r/xI2vF3/3
For js:
(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:www\.)?twitter\.com\/(?:#!\/)?#?([^\/\?\s]*)

Answer 5

Lombo's answer is my favorite, but it will glom any query string in with the result:
http://www.twitter.com/#!/donttrythis?source=internet
will result in a username of "donttrythis?source=internet"
I'd modify it to be:
preg_match("|https?://(www\.)?twitter\.com/(#!/)?#?([^/\?]*)|", $twitterUrl, $matches);
Adding \? to the excluded character class after the username ensures the query string is excluded.

Answer 6

This regex matches all four given URLs. The user name is present in $1
m[twitter\.com/+(?:#!/+)?(\w+)]
Use this to check
perl -le '$_="<url>"; m[twitter\.com/+(?:#!/+)?(\w+)]; print $1'

Answer 7

This one works for me (in PHP): /twitter\.com(?:\/\#!)?\/(\w+)/i

Answer 8

I found Lombo's answer to work the best except it would not work if the URL was www.twitter.com/example . The following works for me on www as well.
$dirty_twitter = array( 'https://twitter.com/', 'http://twitter.com/', 'www.twitter.com/', 'https://www.twitter.com/', 'http://www.twitter.com/', 'twitter.com/' );
$clean_twitter = str_replace( $dirty_twitter, '', $clean_twitter );