YouTube API Comments Feed

Question

I am attempting to get the Comments Feed from a video entry using the YouTube API for .NET. I am working on a program in WPF and C#, but can't seem for the life of me to figure out how to retrieve this feed.

I tried looking at the YouTube API Developer's Guide, but it seems to be missing some information about Comment Feeds (near the bottom of the page).

Answer 1

This has changed in version 3 of the YouTube API. There is a new endpoint called commentThreads/list which allows you to return a thread of comments for a resource.

If you want to return a list of comments on a video resource, set up a GET request with part=id,snippet and videoId=[VIDEO_ID]. I'll be using https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwNIDcwfRLY as an example:

HTTP GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/commentThreads?part=id%2Csnippet&videoId=HwNIDcwfRLY&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

Let's use the first comment returned as an example:

{
    "kind": "youtube#commentThread",
    "etag": "\"DsOZ7qVJA4mxdTxZeNzis6uE6ck/jhK_kJqnNF8_fiRI_o7w6ehubv8\"",
    "id": "z120sfshyxzewt1nx23sevyr1vu1jd2pr04",
    "snippet": {
        "videoId": "HwNIDcwfRLY",
        "topLevelComment": {
            "kind": "youtube#comment",
            "etag": "\"DsOZ7qVJA4mxdTxZeNzis6uE6ck/h903NemnXx-8Hfe6lRIYCFERSe4\"",
            "id": "z120sfshyxzewt1nx23sevyr1vu1jd2pr04",
            "snippet": {
            "authorDisplayName": "mach-a-chine seahawksgoonie",
            "authorProfileImageUrl": "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XdUIqdMkCWA/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/4252rscbv5M/photo.jpg?sz=50",
            "authorChannelUrl": "http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBmJ0sw7plIZHLvhfz7oo_w",
            "authorChannelId": {
                "value": "UCBmJ0sw7plIZHLvhfz7oo_w"
            },
            "videoId": "HwNIDcwfRLY",
            "textDisplay": "",
            "authorGoogleplusProfileUrl": "https://plus.google.com/102274783439566633837",
            "canRate": true,
            "viewerRating": "none",
            "likeCount": 0,
            "publishedAt": "2016-02-05T03:42:35.158Z",
            "updatedAt": "2016-02-05T03:42:35.158Z"
            }
        },
        "canReply": true,
        "totalReplyCount": 0,
        "isPublic": true
    }
}

Note that the comment isn't actually in this topLevelComment object. textDisplay returns the empty string, which is a known issue with the YouTube API. We need to make an additional request to commentThreads/list with id=[COMMENT_ID], where [COMMENT_ID] is topLevelComment.id:

HTTP GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/commentThreads?part=id%2Csnippet&id=z120sfshyxzewt1nx23sevyr1vu1jd2pr04&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

The resulting response's snippet dictionary will have the user's comment as the value for the textDisplay key:

"snippet": {
    "authorDisplayName": "mach-a-chine seahawksgoonie",
    "authorProfileImageUrl": "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XdUIqdMkCWA/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/4252rscbv5M/photo.jpg?sz=50",
    "authorChannelUrl": "http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBmJ0sw7plIZHLvhfz7oo_w",
    "authorChannelId": {
            "value": "UCBmJ0sw7plIZHLvhfz7oo_w"
    },
    "videoId": "HwNIDcwfRLY",
    "textDisplay": "my next ring tone! yeah boy!\ufeff",
    "authorGoogleplusProfileUrl": "https://plus.google.com/102274783439566633837",
    "canRate": true,
    "viewerRating": "none",
    "likeCount": 0,
    "publishedAt": "2016-02-05T03:42:35.158Z",
    "updatedAt": "2016-02-05T03:42:35.158Z"
    }
}

The comment is: "my next ring tone! yeah boy!"

Note that you can also pass in a list of up to 50 comma-separated id or videoId strings of comment objects to retrieve per API call.

See the Retrieve comments for a video guide for additional information and sample code.