Retrieve YouTube video details, including description from video URL using PHP? - php

Question

After searching stackoverflow, I've found: How can I retrieve YouTube video details from video URL using PHP?
using the following code (I have changed to https instead of http and also added $_GET['v'] for getting video code from browser URL):
function get_youtube($url) {
$youtube = "https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=". $url ."&format=json";
$curl = curl_init($youtube);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$return = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
return json_decode($return, true);
}
$url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' . $_GET['v'];
// Display Data
echo '<pre>';
print_r(get_youtube($url));
echo '</pre>';
I was able to get the following result:
Array
(
[thumbnail_url] => https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AhN5MbTJ0pk/hqdefault.jpg
[version] => 1.0
[type] => video
[html] => <iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AhN5MbTJ0pk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[provider_url] => https://www.youtube.com/
[thumbnail_width] => 480
[width] => 480
[thumbnail_height] => 360
[author_url] => https://www.youtube.com/user/AndreasChoice
[author_name] => AndreasChoice
[title] => GROSS SMOOTHIE CHALLENGE! ft. Tealaxx2
[height] => 270
[provider_name] => YouTube
)
Which is great, but I also need to retrieve the full 'description' of the video that is missing. How can I achieve this? Thank you.

Answer 1

In order to receive the description of a video you have 2 options.
Use an API.
Crawl the website.
The API that you need is under googleapis.com domain.
The url that you need to use is:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?id=VIDEO_ID&key=YOUR_API_KEY&fields=items(id,snippet(description))&part=snippet
Notice that you have to change the VIDEO_ID and YOUR_API_KEY.
To get an API key follow these instructions: link.
Building a web crawler is more complex.
Try following this tutorial to build your own web crawler here