Scraping Youtube Videos - Using Python's Requests & JSON Libraries

In this post we will look into Scraping any Youtube video metadata to get the views, likes, dislikes, published date etc. information using Python. We will not be using any third party libraries which parse the HTML like Beautiful Soup.

Problem Statement:

To fetch Youtube video metadata like its View count, Likes/Dislikes count, Published Date, Title of the video etc. without using any 3rd party libraries which parses HTML or Javascript. To add to that, we will not be using the Youtube API to fetch data.

Approach

There are multiple ways to fetch the data from youtube, or any other website. In order to parse the website, Beautiful Soup library can be used. But we will use even simpler way to get out required data-set. We will be using python requests library to get the page source of the youtube video link and json library to parse the text to Json object. There is a pattern to any Youtube video page source. When you open the page source, search for 'ytInitialData' in the page source, and you will find that in the script tag, this variable is assigned with a Json. Only problem is that, we cannot use it as it is, and needs some manipulation. So basically, we will be manipulating strings in Python to get the data we want. To get the exact Json, I need to find the start and end Index of this Json from the page source. Lets try it out for any Youtube video you are watching.

1. For getting the page source of any website, you can right click on the website and click on the View Page Source option

2. Search for ytInitialData in the tab where the page source is open. Actual string will be like this:

Code

Lets code it in Python step by step:

You need to import json and requests libraries as the prerequisite step.

import json
import requests

From the given video link, get the page source using request library and save the text format to some variable

def import_video_data(URL):
    print('Fetching Video page source using URL ' + URL)
    # window["ytInitialData"] =
    page_source = requests.get(URL)
    page_source = page_source.text

Extract the json data from the page source of the given video link.

    start_index = page_source.find('ytInitialData')
    tmp = page_source[ start_index+17:]
    end_index = tmp.find('}};')
    tmp = tmp[:end_index] + '}}'
    return tmp

Now, parse the string returned as Json object using Json library. Here we are using loads() method to convert the Json string into a dictionary.

def parse_json(json_data):
    json_dict = json.loads(json_data)
    return json_dict

The Json we fetched in the last step will look something like this:

From the Json, we can now extract any information we want.

The basic manual way to get the title, video Id, View Count, Likes, Dislikes, their short form and its published date are displayed here:

For Video Id:

video_id = yt_json['currentVideoEndpoint']['watchEndpoint']['videoId']
print('VideoId:' + video_id)

For Title:

title = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['title']['runs'][0]['text']
print('Title:'+ title)

For View count and its short form:

views = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['viewCount']['videoViewCountRenderer']['viewCount']['simpleText']

short_views = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['viewCount']['videoViewCountRenderer']['shortViewCount']['simpleText']

print('Views:' + views + ' in short:'+ short_views)

For Likes and its short form:

likes = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['videoActions']['menuRenderer']['topLevelButtons'][0]['toggleButtonRenderer']['defaultText']['accessibility']['accessibilityData']['label']

likes_inshort = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['videoActions']['menuRenderer']['topLevelButtons'][0]['toggleButtonRenderer']['defaultText']['simpleText']

print('Likes:'+ likes+' in short:'+ likes_inshort)

For Dislikes and its short form:

dislikes = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['videoActions']['menuRenderer']['topLevelButtons'][1]['toggleButtonRenderer']['defaultText']['accessibility']['accessibilityData']['label']

dislikes_inshort = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['videoActions']['menuRenderer']['topLevelButtons'][1]['toggleButtonRenderer']['defaultText']['simpleText']

print('Dis-Likes:'+ dislikes+' in short:'+ dislikes_inshort)

For Published Date:

published_date = yt_json['contents']['twoColumnWatchNextResults']['results']['results']['contents'][0]['videoPrimaryInfoRenderer']['dateText']['simpleText']

print('Published Date:'+ published_date)

The output of the above code will be look like this:

Fetching Video stats (as per date 3rd August, 2020)

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRtgXN-bwGE VideoId: JRtgXN-bwGE Title: Honest Review | Raat Akeli Hai, Shakuntala Devi & Lootcase | MensXP Views: 282,420 views in short:282K views Likes: 21,343 likes in short: 21K Dis-Likes: 413 dislikes in short:413 Published Date: 1 Aug 2020

Using the above technique, you will have the Json and can extract any data which is required. You can find this entire code on my Github Repository.

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