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Every once in a while I come up with a bit of code that might be useful to other programmers, and here’s one of those bits — a regular expression that extracts the ASIN product code from almost any Amazon product URL, including URLs from non-US Amazon stores. (It doesn’t handle pages of search results or other index pages, however.)

I use this at LGF to rewrite links to Amazon and add our affiliate ID to the link, so if someone clicks the link we get a small percentage of the purchase price when they buy something.

This code used to be a series of regular expressions that matched each type of URL, but I was looking at it this week and realized it might be possible to condense the whole process down to just one regex. And after extensive testing, I think I may have gotten pretty close to a universal Amazon ASIN extractor. (I searched Google, and couldn’t find anything this good online.)

In this PHP code, I used the x modifier to let me split the regex across multiple lines with comments and indenting. I also used ~ for the regular expression delimiter so all the forward slashes don’t need to be escaped. These two steps make the code much more readable, but if you use this regex with a language that doesn’t allow you to change the delimiter you’ll need to insert a backslash before each forward slash.

(Notice that I used non-capturing groups for everything except the ASIN product ID.)

<?php
$regex = '~
	(?:www\.)?				# optionally starts with www.
	ama?zo?n\.				# also allow shortened amzn.com URLs
	(?:
		com					# match all Amazon domains
		|
		ca
		|
		co\.uk
		|
		co\.jp
		|
		de
		|
		fr
	)
	/
	(?:						# here comes the stuff before the ASIN
		exec/obidos/ASIN/	# the possible components of a URL
		|
		o/
		|
		gp/product/
		|
		(?:					# the dp/ format may contain a title
			(?:[^"\'/]*)/	# anything but a slash or quote
		)?					# optional
		dp/
		|					# if short format, nothing before ASIN
	)
	(B[A-Z0-9]{9})			# capture group $1 contains the ASIN
	(?:						# everything after the ASIN
		(?:/|\?|\#)			# beginning with /, ? or #
		(?:[^"\'\s]*)		# everything up to quote or white space
	)?						# optional
~isx';
?>

Here’s a bit of code that puts this regex to work and inserts our affiliate ID into the reconstructed link:

<?php
$text = preg_replace($regex, 'www.amazon.com/dp/$1/?tag=littlegreenfo-20', $text);
?>

And here’s what this regular expression looks like when condensed down to one gnarly line:

<?php
$regex = '~(?:www\.)?ama?zo?n\.(?:com|ca|co\.uk|co\.jp|de|fr)/(?:exec/obidos/ASIN/|o/|gp/product/|(?:(?:[^"\'/]*)/)?dp/|)(B[A-Z0-9]{9})(?:(?:/|\?|\#)(?:[^"\'\s]*))?~isx';
?>

If you run this regular expression against the following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle/dp/B00RSGFRY8/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1421879835&sr=1-1&keywords=the%20man%20in%20the%20high%20castle

You end up with this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RSGFRY8/?tag=littlegreenfo-20

YouTube

Here’s a great live performance by Neil Finn, with the late Paul Hester on drums, doing one of his classic songs, “Fall At Your Feet.”

Neil Finn performing live at the Chapel in support of his One Nil release. Special appearances by Jim Moginie, Paul Hester, and Nick Seymour

Here it is, folks — the hit piece on Dana Loesch Chuck C. Johnson has been threatening to post all day; he finally worked up the guts to go through with it: BUSTED: The Real Dana Loesch: A Hypocrite and a Fraud Lying About Andrew Breitbart and Me.

Hilariously, this whole brouhaha was started when Chuck and Dana got in a pissing match over who was really the inheritor of dead Andrew Breitbart’s “legacy.”

Yes, that’s right — they’re squabbling over who’s the sleaziest bottom feeder of them all. Pardon me while I put on some more popcorn. Can they both win?

Loesch fires back at the Ginger Avenger.

YouTube

Even by Sarah Palin’s already low standards, this speech is extraordinarily incoherent and scattered. I’ve seen a lot of her speeches (do not pity me, it is my job), and I can’t remember a more garbled, deeply weird performance from Caribou Barbie.

Video

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Caribou Barbie is about to take the stage at the Iowa Freedom Freakout. Let’s give her a warm welcome, shall we?

MSNBC

Creationist Gov. Booby Jindal is hosting a prayer rally in Louisiana today, co-sponsored by the homophobic hate group known as the American Family Association. Yes, that’s loony Bryan Fischer’s gang of religious right wackos. Jindal is trying to stake out a position as the most fanatical far right Christian in the 2016 race, apparently, but he’s got a lot of competition for that slot.

This Rachel Maddow segment does a good job of showing how completely batshit nuts the AFA is.

Amazon is promoting their original series Transparent by offering a discount on Prime memberships - today only until midnight PT. Also Transparent is free to watch today.

Amazon Prime

Existing members can (allegedly) buy a one-year membership at this sale price by doing the following (I haven’t tried this, so no guarantees):

1. Buy a gift membership and send it to yourself.
2. Turn off auto-renew on your Prime membership.
3. Use the gift membership to renew your Prime when the time comes.

Tonight’s Sarah Palin moment features Caribou Barbie obviously approving of a wingnut sign that puts target signs in the Os of Michael Moore’s name.

I’m not Moore’s biggest fan, but hey — shouldn’t Sarah be careful about stuff like this with her blood-stained history of using target signs for political incitement?

YouTube

The novelty has worn off a bit, but Bad Lip Reading videos can still make one emit the occasional chortle or guffaw.