How to get all YouTube comments with Python's gdata module?

Question

Looking to grab all the comments from a given video, rather than go one page at a time.

from gdata import youtube as yt
from gdata.youtube import service as yts

client = yts.YouTubeService()
client.ClientLogin(username, pwd) #the pwd might need to be application specific fyi

comments = client.GetYouTubeVideoComments(video_id='the_id')
a_comment = comments.entry[0]

The above code with let you grab a single comment, likely the most recent comment, but I'm looking for a way to grab all the comments at once. Is this possible with Python's gdata module?

---

The Youtube API docs for comments, the comment feed docs and the Python API docs

Answer 1

The following achieves what you asked for using the Python YouTube API:

from gdata.youtube import service

USERNAME = '[email protected]'
PASSWORD = 'a_very_long_password'
VIDEO_ID = 'wf_IIbT8HGk'

def comments_generator(client, video_id):
    comment_feed = client.GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed(video_id=video_id)
    while comment_feed is not None:
        for comment in comment_feed.entry:
             yield comment
        next_link = comment_feed.GetNextLink()
        if next_link is None:
             comment_feed = None
        else:
             comment_feed = client.GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed(next_link.href)

client = service.YouTubeService()
client.ClientLogin(USERNAME, PASSWORD)

for comment in comments_generator(client, VIDEO_ID):
    author_name = comment.author[0].name.text
    text = comment.content.text
    print("{}: {}".format(author_name, text))

Unfortunately the API limits the number of entries that can be retrieved to 1000. This was the error I got when I tried a tweaked version with a hand crafted GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed URL parameter:

gdata.service.RequestError: {'status': 400, 'body': 'You cannot request beyond item 1000.', 'reason': 'Bad Request'}

Note that the same principle should apply to retrieve entries in other feeds of the API.

If you want to hand craft the GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed URL parameter, its format is:

'https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/{video_id}/comments?start-index={sta‌​rt_index}&max-results={max_results}'

The following restrictions apply: start-index <= 1000 and max-results <= 50.

Answer 2

The only solution I've got for now, but it's not using the API and gets slow when there's several thousand comments.

import bs4, re, urllib2
#grab the page source for vide
data = urllib2.urlopen(r'http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=video_id') #example XhFtHW4YB7M
#pull out comments
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(data)
cmnts = soup.findAll(attrs={'class': 'comment yt-tile-default'})
#do something with them, ie count them
print len(cmnts)

Note that due to 'class' being a builtin python name, you can't do regular searches for 'startwith' via regex or lambdas as seen here, since you're using a dict, over regular parameters. It also gets pretty slow due to BeautifulSoup, but it needs to get used because etree and minidom don't find matching tags for some reason. Even after prettyfying() with bs4