Youtube-comment-scraper NPM

Youtube comment scraper

Scraping comments from Youtube.

Installation

To install youtube-comment-scraper in your global environment,

$ npm install -g youtube-comment-scraper

after that, you can use scraper command.

Usage

Usage: scraper url [options]

        url
                URL for a Youtube video page or video ID.

        --help, -h
                Displays help information about this script

        --version
                Displays version info

Output is a JSON format text. Its schema looks like

{
  "id": "the video ID.",
  "channel":{
    "id": "ID of the channel the video belongs to.",
    "name" : "the channel name."
  },
  "comments": [
    {
      "root": "root (parent) comment body.",
      "author": "author of the root comment.",
      "author_id": "ID of the author",
      "like": "like score (summation of +1 for like and -1 for dislike).",
      "children": [
        {
          "comment": "reply comment.",
          "author": "author of the reply comment.",
          "author_id": "author ID",
          "like": "like score."
        },
        ...
      ]
    },
    ...
  ]
}

Method

var scraper = require("youtube-comment-scraper");

`scraper.comments(url)`

Scraping a given Youtube page and return a set of comments.

Args:
- url: URL of the target page or video ID.
Returns: Promise object. Use "then" to receive results.

`scraper.channel(url)`

Scraping a Youtube channel page and return a description of the channel.

Args:
- id: channel ID.
Returns: Promise object. Use "then" method to receive results.

`scraper.close()`

Cleanup this module. After all scrapings have done, this method should be called. Otherwise, some instances of PhantomJS will keep running and it prevents finishing main process.

example

scraper.comments(some_url).then(function(res) {
  // Printing the result.
  console.log(JSON.stringify({
    url: some_url,
    comments: res
  }));

  // Close scraper.
  scraper.close();
});