youtube data api comment paging

Question

Hi,

I'm struggling a little bit with the syntax for iterating through all comments on a youtube video. I'm using the python and have found little documentation on the GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed() function.

What I'm really trying to do is search all comments of a video for an instance of a word and increase a counter (eventually the comment will be printed out). It functions for the 25 results returned, but I need to access the rest of the comments.

import gdata.youtube
import gdata.youtube.service

video_id = 'hMnk7lh9M3o'
yt_service = gdata.youtube.service.YouTubeService()    
comment_feed = yt_service.GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed(video_id=video_id)
for comment_entry in comment_feed.entry:
 comment = comment_entry.content.text
 if comment.find('hi') != -1:
  counter = counter + 1

print "hi: "
print counter

I tried to set the start_index of GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed() in addition to the video_id but it didn't like that.

Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks! Steve

Answer 1

Found out how to do it. Instead of passing a video_id to the GetYouTubeVideoCommentFeed function, you can pass it a URL. You can iterate through the comments by changing the URL parameters.

There must be an API limitation though; I can only access the last 1000 comments on the video.