YouTube Links vs Embeds vs WordPress Automunge

Some of this will depend on the esoterica of HTML “quoting” and special character stealing.

For that reason, first you ought to review this article:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/urls-html-unicode-wordpress-antics/

Now, just to make your head spin a little, notice that in that article I type the special unicode sequences to give you special characters AND the special sequences to have them show up on the screen as regular character strings (instead of substituting the special character itself.) There is a peculiar art to thinking in quotes and quotes of quotes…

So, for example, the & character can be just typed. The Unicode to give an ampersand is & but that will show up as & if you don’t ‘quote it right’, but that means turning some of the OTHER special characters into Unicode so they are not stolen by wordpress and used as part of ONE unicode character. So I turned the first & of the & into unicode as & to get it to display. Repeat with recursion as necessary to get what I just did here…

OK, so I’m going to be working one level deeper in the recursive quoting pile to make some of this show up in addition to “doing what it does”. That level will be left “as an exercise for the terminally curious”…

Now, first up, realize that what WordPress does in an article as I am typing it is sometimes different from what it does in a comment. So in fact I’ll need to keep track of two different things in two different places while doing 2 to 3 different levels of quoting. This is the kind of stuff that drives folks crazy (but that Geek Types curiously enjoy as a challenge.)

YouTube URL vs EMBEDS

There are several different places you can pick up a YouTube name to put it into an article or a comment. They are somewhat different and you need to be able to keep track of who is a what.

Realize, too, that some search engines (like Google…) will sometimes put their own ‘wrapper’ on a search result so that it gives them credit for the link. I always watch for that and strip it out. They are the very very long multiple line URLs that start with google.com instead of your target address and somewhere further down the line have html:foo for your actual target. I avoid Google (prefering the non-track-me search engines like https://duckduckgo.com.

Which brings up the “basic html href to a link” syntax. For many links, you can just paste it into a comment and WordPress will turn it into an active link. Type or paste “https://duckduckgo.com” and it becomes a live link. You can do the “make it live” explicitly with an href wrapper like:

<a href=”https://duckduckgo.com”>Display Text that can be the link</a>

Similar things can be done with a YouTube so that the display text can say something descriptive and the video is not displayed but linked. So something like “Watch This Lady Gaga Vid I like” as the display text and the youtube URL in the quoted string of the href. But which YouTube URL?

So say I’m watching a YouTube. At the top of my browser is the URL to get to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeWBS0JBNzQ

this is just the site name and a tag to point at a particular video. that v={whatever}. Just paste it in on a line by itself, you get the video:

It does the same thing in both articles and comments, BTW. Simply paste the URL, get the video.

Now one fancy fix would be to put that in an html href wrapper:

<a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeWBS0JBNzQ”>Love This Edge Of Glory by Gaga!</a>

(BTW, to make that display and prevent WordPress from stealing the link inside and activating it as a simple ‘paste’, I had to change the : to &#058; and the angle brackets to unicode as well. Oddly, to get the : unicode to display, I had to substitute BOTH the & and the # where # is &#035; but I recurse… )

Which gives:

Love This Edge Of Glory by Gaga!

At one time you could also get a link to display and NOT be active just by slamming text up against it, but WordPress seems to have “fixed that” now as testing in both an article and a comment had them both detect and activate the link. Oh Well, things change. However, while it activates the link, it does not display the video, so for example:

Look at this pasted video URL on this line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeWBS0JBNzQ

It is also possible to deactivate a link just by putting gratuitous white space in it, like a gap between https and the : but that’s pretty simple stuff.

Look at this video: https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeWBS0JBNzQ

These work the same both in articles and in comments. (NOW, but I’m pretty sure it was different a few years ago when pasted into an article. Then, pasted links did not auto-activate without an html wrapper, but do remember “things change”…)

Just below the video at YouTube is a little ‘share’ button. When you click it, it gives you a choice of ‘share’ or ’embed’. The “share” URL it gives is:

https://youtu.be/QeWBS0JBNzQ

When pasted into things, it is activated just like the regular URL line from the top of the YouTube page. Why they have two different URLS that do the same thing is an interesting question, but there it is. Note that the video name text “QeWBS0JBNzQ” is the same in both.

If you choose “embed” the text it gives you has controls for things like height and width:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/QeWBS0JBNzQ” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Pasted into an article, WordPress turns that into

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/QeWBS0JBNzQ&w=560&h=315]

which then displays as:

Note the different size compared to the straight paste up top.

BUT, pasted into a comment shows nothing on the screen, but has this in the text I see when I edit that comment:

<a href=”” rel=”nofollow”></a>

Since WordPress tries to convert it to something it likes but instead just strips out all the guts of it… This usually shows up when someone wants to change the display size of a video and tries the embed code. It has choices of sizes under the “more” tab…

In Conclusion

Hopefully this is useful to folks wondering at what the heck WordPress did to their video paste.

It is in response to a request from llanfar here:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/week-2-of-1-a-t/#comment-79435 and even though Gail already tipped him about the “paste on a line with text” which is all that’s really needed for that use case, I just could not resist the challenge of doing nested recursive unicode in the context of YouTube links and how WordPress does “special” things to it ;-)

With luck, this will be interesting, even if ‘way overkill’ ;-)

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