Simple script for downloading Youtube comments without using the Youtube API. The output is in line delimited JSON.
- Python 2.7+
- requests
- lxml
- cssselect
The python packages can be installed with
pip install requests
pip install lxml
pip install cssselect
usage: downloader.py [--help] [--youtubeid YOUTUBEID | --input INPUT] [--output OUTPUT]
Download Youtube comments without using the Youtube API
optional arguments:
--help, -h Show this help message and exit
--youtubeid YOUTUBEID, -y YOUTUBEID
ID of Youtube video for which to download the comments
--input INPUT, -i INPUT
Input filename (a file containing video IDs, one ID per line)
--output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT
Output filename (output format is line delimited JSON).
If comments are being downloaded for multiple videos (through -i)
this should be a template with "id" as a key. See examples below
For example:
python downloader.py --youtubeid ScMzIvxBSi4 --output ScMzIvxBSi4.json
#Download comments for each video in videos.txt and save each output under your/path directory
python downloader.py --input video_ids.txt --output 'your/path/%(id)s.json'
#Download comments for each video in videos.txt and save the output in a comments.json file under a separate directory for each video
python downloader.py --input video_ids.txt --output '%(id)s/comments.json'
For Youtube IDs starting with - (dash) you will need to run the script with:
-y=-idwithdash or --youtubeid=-idwithdash