How to map youtube handles to channel IDs

Question

Youtube recently rolled out handles feature where they gave users youtube.com/@xxx type usernames, when visited these URLs show user's channel but I can't find any documentation or reference in API repositories.

How to extract youtube user channel ID from their handle?

Answer 1

YouTube Data API v3 now supports forHandle filter, see the Stack Overflow answer 77974042.

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One more time YouTube Data API v3 doesn't provide a basic feature.

I recommend you to try out my open-source YouTube operational API. Indeed by fetching https://yt.lemnoslife.com/channels?handle=@HANDLE you will get the YouTube channel id you are looking for in item["id"].

For instance with the YouTube channel handle @WHO, you would get:

{
    "kind": "youtube#channelListResponse",
    "etag": "NotImplemented",
    "items": [
        {
            "kind": "youtube#channel",
            "etag": "NotImplemented",
            "id": "UC07-dOwgza1IguKA86jqxNA"
        }
    ]
}