PyTube3 Playlist returns empty list

Question

It seems that sometime in the past 2 or 3 weeks, the Playlist class seems to have stopped working for me. I've tried the following code snippet adapted from their GitHub:

from pytube import Playlist
playlist = Playlist("https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLynhp4cZEpTbRs_PYISQ8v_uwO0_mDg_X")

print(len(playlist.video_urls))
for url in playlist.video_urls:
    print(url)

I've tried multiple public playlists but they all produced an empty list object. This code was working about 3 weeks ago. Also, I am running Python 3.7.6 and the latest version of PyTube3 (9.6.4).

Is there something that I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

I looked into the source a bit and it seemed that it would load the html and then perform a regex search for /watch/v=... URLs. The regex expression used was href=\"(/watch\?v=[\w-]*) but it couldn't find any matches since YouTube must have updated their html. They now send the watch URLs in a JSON object. So we should look for that instead.

Here is something that works:

from pytube import Playlist
import re

playlist = Playlist("https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLynhp4cZEpTbRs_PYISQ8v_uwO0_mDg_X")
playlist._video_regex = re.compile(r"\"url\":\"(/watch\?v=[\w-]*)")

print(len(playlist.video_urls))
for url in playlist.video_urls:
    print(url)

Hope this is useful until the next patch.