Using PHP's in-built function, parse_url, you can write a helper method to pull the channel ID off a YouTube URL especially if you're pulling videos using YouTube's Data API. Here's the code:

<?php
public function extractChannelID($url){
    // Parse the link and trim any whitespaces
    $parsed_link = parse_url(rtrim($url, '/'));

    // Return the channel ID if it matches the pattern
    if (isset($parsed_link['path']) && preg_match('/^\/channel\/(([^\/])+?)$/', $parsed_link['path'], $matches)) {
        return $matches[1];
    }

    throw new Exception("This {$url} is not a valid YouTube channel URL");
    return null;
}
?>

Writing tiny methods like these can help save time and be reusable in more than one context.

Hope you find this tip useful! 😁