How to scrape youtube playlist using python

Ever wanted to extract information from YouTube playlists? I recently needed to grab details like video titles and descriptions from a YouTube channel, and thought I’d share my approach. This simple tutorial will walk you through scraping a YouTube playlist using Python. Let’s dive in!

1. First, let’s import the essential packages:

   from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
   import requests
   

2. Next, we’ll make a GET request to fetch the page content:

   # Target the specific playlist URL
   link='https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRVhX1weTUd_hs_mcpfwcOq18tSdL0y60'
   # Use requests to fetch the webpage content
   r=requests.get(link) 
   page=r.text # Convert to text
   soup=bs(page,'html.parser') # Parse with BeautifulSoup
   #print(soup.prettify()) # Uncomment to see the HTML structure
   

3. To extract video titles:

   title_soup=soup.find('meta',property='og:title')
   vid_title=title_soup['content'] if title_soup else 'not found'
   print(vid_title)
   

4. For video descriptions:

   disrip_soup=soup.find('meta',property='og:description')
   vid_discription=disrip_soup['content'] if disrip_soup else 'not found'
   print(vid_discription)
   

5. Trying to get upload dates (which doesn’t work for playlists):

   date_soup=soup.find('meta',itemprop='uploadDate') # Doesn't work for playlists
   upload_date=date_soup['content'] if date_soup else 'not found'
   print(upload_date)
   #->not found
   

Web scraping doesn’t have to be intimidating! YouTube’s structured format makes it relatively straightforward to extract the information you need. You can expand on this foundation to extract other metadata using different property tags. Happy scraping!