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Youtube Comments Extraction

Introduction

There are multiple ways to obtain the text of comments from Youtube videos. One of the easiest ways is by downloading one of the Kaggle datasets containing those comments (note: there is an updated version). However, with this method, the comments from a specific Youtube video may not necessarily be available (especially if the video is very recent). Another option is to scrape the data directly from the website, but this could become problematic if Youtube's website layout changes. A third way, which we use here, is to use the Youtube API to extract the comments.

The process to extract the comments requires a few steps, and is described as follows:

Pulling data from Youtube API

In order to extract the Youtube comments, the Youtube API was chosen over scraping the data directly from the website. The advantage of this approach is that it will continue to work, even if the website layout changes. Note however, that the API has a limitation of about 10k requests per day.

Enabling the Youtube API

In order to use the Youtube API, it must first be enabled as follows:

  1. Go to the GCP (Google Cloud Platform) APIs & Services Dashboard
  2. Click the "+ENABLE APIS AND SERVICES" and search for "Youtube". Click on "YouTube Data API v3"
  3. Enable the API

Generating a Youtube API key

To use the Youtube API, a key must be generated, and saved. The steps to do this are as follows:

  1. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials
  2. Click "+CREATE CREDENTIALS" and choose "API KEY". Click "RESTRICT KEY"
  3. In the "API Restrictions" section, choose the "Restrict Key" option. Click in the "Select APIs" dropdown box, and choose "Youtube Data API v3". Click Save.

Export your Youtube API key (in your shell environment or place it in your startup script, e.g. in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc) as follows:

export YOUTUBE_API_KEY="...your_Youtube_API_key_here..."

Downloading the comments

In order to extract the comments from the Youtube page, the code get_comments_of_video_id.py from the Github repo github.com/XWilliamY/custom_yt_comments_dataset was adapted slightly and stored in this Git repository here.

To use the Python script, the dependencies must first be installed:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, run the Python script as follows to get the comments from the first presidential debate (storing the data in data/wW1lY5jFNcQ_csv_final.csv):

python get_comments_of_video_id.py --video_url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW1lY5jFNcQ

To get the comments for the second presidential debate:

python get_comments_of_video_id.py --video_url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPiofmZGb8o

The data is stored indata/bPiofmZGb8o_csv_final.csv (the Youtube comments files take the format {video_id}_csv.csv). This file may be read using the Python/Pandas library using df = pd.read_csv('{video_id}_final.csv', header=None).

Note: Later, it was found that multi-line comments made it difficult to read in the csv files. To solve this issue, the data was saved in the .feather format instead.