How to get link to third party site in 'about channel' section via python - youtube-api

Question

I want to display information about links in the YouTube profile in a text document, I tried to do it through the requests library, but Google gave links to privacy and security, I did not find information about this in the YouTube API documentation. Who knows, you can help with this

Answer 1

This isn't possible to get using the YouTube API, I actually found myself needing to do the same thing as yourself and was not able to because the YouTube API lacked the necessary functionality (Hopefully, It will be added soon!)
I see you mentioned Python, My only solution is in Node but I will do a large explanation and you can base your code off of it. In order to get the banner links without the YouTube API, we need to scrape the data, since YouTube uses client-side rendering we need to scrape the JSON configuration from the source.
There's a variable defined inside a script called ytInitialData which is a big JSON string with a massive amount of information about the channel, viewer, and YouTube configurations. We can find the banner links by parsing through this JSON link.
const request = require("request-promise").defaults({
simple: false,
resolveWithFullResponse: true
})
const getBannerLinks = async () => {
return request("https://www.youtube.com/user/pewdiepie").then(res => {
if (res.statusCode === 200) {
const parsed = res.body.split("var ytInitialData = ")[1].split(";</script>")[0]
const data = JSON.parse(parsed)
const links = data.header.c4TabbedHeaderRenderer.headerLinks.channelHeaderLinksRenderer
const allLinks = links.primaryLinks.concat(links.secondaryLinks || [])
const parsedLinks = allLinks.map(l => {
const url = new URLSearchParams(l.navigationEndpoint.commandMetadata.webCommandMetadata.url)
return {
link: url.get("q"),
name: l.title.simpleText,
icon: l.icon.thumbnails[0].url
}
})
return parsedLinks
} else {
// Error/ratelimit - Handle here
}
})
}
The way the links are scraped is as follows:
We make a HTTP request to the channel's URL
We parse the body to extract the JSON string that the banner links are inside using split
We parse the JSON string into a JSON object
We extract the links from their JSON section (It's a big JSON object data.header.c4TabbedHeaderRenderer.headerLinks.channelHeaderLinksRenderer
Because there are two types of links (Primary, the one that shows the text and secondary, links that don't show the text) we have to concatenate them together so we can map through them
We then map through the links and use URLSearchParams to extract the q query parameter since YouTube encrypts their outgoing links (Most likely for security reasons) and then extract the name and icon too using their appropriate objects.
This isn't a perfect solution, should YouTube update/change anything on their front end this could break your program easily. YouTube also has rate limits for their software if you're trying to mass scrape you'll run into 429/403 errors.