How can I search inside a youtube playlist? - youtube

Question

I need to know if youtube API V3 supports searching inside a specific youtube playlist? And is there any other way to do that?

Answer 1

I have read the YouTuBe API documentation regarding requests on playlists and they don't provide such functionality, however you could use this npm module to achieve that:
npm install youtube-playlist-search
or
yarn install youtube-playlist-search
The way to use it is something like this on javascript:
var search = require('youtube-playlist-search');
var params = {
part: 'snippet,contentDetails',
maxResults: 25,
key: 'your_api_key'
};
search('searchTerm', params, function(err, videos) {
if(err) return console.log(err);
console.dir(videos);
});
Or you can also take a look here where I'm using it with React, the code it will be something like:
import _ from 'lodash';
import YTSearch from 'youtube-playlist-search';
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import logo from './logo.svg';
import './App.css';
import SearchBar from './components/search_bar';
import VideoList from './components/video_list';
import VideoDetail from './components/video_detail';
class App extends Component {
constructor(props) {
super(props);
this.state = {
videos: [],
selectedVideo: null
};
this.key = process.env.REACT_APP_YTB_API_KEY_DEV
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
this.key = process.env.REACT_APP_YTB_API_KEY_PROD
}
this.params = {
part: 'snippet,contentDetails',
playlistId: 'PLH99prTh-VPqO7ld0o2Sny6bLxpf80Js0',
key: this.key
};
this.videoSearch('')
}
videoSearch(term) {
YTSearch(term, this.params, (err, videos) => {
this.setState({
videos: videos,
selectedVideo: videos[0]
});
});
}
render() {
const videoSearch = _.debounce((term) => {this.videoSearch(term)}, 300);
return (
<div className="App">
<header className="App-header">
<img src={logo} className="App-logo" alt="logo" />
<h1 className="App-title">Welcome to React</h1>
</header>
<SearchBar onSearchTermChange={videoSearch}/>
<VideoDetail video={this.state.selectedVideo}/>
<VideoList
onVideoSelect={selectedVideo => this.setState({selectedVideo})}
videos={this.state.videos}/>
</div>
);
}
}
export default App;

Answer 2

For doing full-text search in closed captions (CC) in a Youtube channel
you may download all the subtitles from the channel and do local text search in it:
$ youtube-dl --write-auto-sub --skip-download "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6oh54zIYKyW6hgBiZzLLsA"
that will download about 160 .vtt text files
$ grep -i -C 2 'autumn' *.vtt
Note: Option --write-auto-sub should be used when author of videos didn't upload text.
Otherwise use --write-sub.

Answer 3

Unfortunately youtube data API 3 does not support searching inside a playlist, but as a work around we can add a string to user's search so that the results will be near to what is needed, in my case for example I have prefixed all the video titles in a specific playlist with the name of that playlist and then I had to prefix users search query with the specified playlist name, the only drawback is that I had to rename all of the videos to include the prefix.
playlist name: exotic cars
search query: exotic cars + user input
And don't forget to search channel videos only.