How to extract the comments count correctly

Question

I am trying to extract number of youtube comments and tried several methods.

My Code:

from selenium import webdriver
import pandas as pd
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
import time

DRIVER_PATH = <your chromedriver path>
wd = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=DRIVER_PATH)

url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qzKTbnhyhc'

wd.get(url)
wait = WebDriverWait(wd, 100)

time.sleep(40)
v_title = wd.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="container"]/h1/yt-formatted-string').text
print("title Is ")
print(v_title)

comments_xpath = '//h2[@id="count"]/yt-formatted-string/span[1]'
v_comm_cnt = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, comments_xpath)))
#wd.find_element_by_xpath(comments_xpath)
print(len(v_comm_cnt))

I get the following error:

selenium.common.exceptions.TimeoutException: Message:

I get correct value for title but not for comment_cnt. Can any one please guide me what is wrong with my code?

Please note that comments count path – //h2[@id="count"]/yt-formatted-string/span[1] point to correct place if I search the value in inspect element.

Asked By: user1768029

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Source

Answer 1

Updated answer
Well, it was tricky!
There are several issues here:

This page has some bad java scripts on it making the Selenium webdriver driver.get() method to wait until the timeout for the page loaded while it looks like the page is loaded. To overcome that I used Eager page load strategy.
This page has several blocks of code for the same areas so as sometimes one of them is used (visible) and sometimes the second. This makes working with element locators difficultly. So, here I am waiting for visibility of title element from one of that blocks. In case it was visible – I’m extracting the text from there, otherwise I’m waiting for the visibility of the second element (it comes immediately) and extracting the text from there.
There are several ways to make page scrolling. Not all of them worked here. I found the one that is working and scrolling not too much.
The code below is 100% working, I run it several times.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service


options = Options()
options.add_argument("--start-maximized")

caps = DesiredCapabilities().CHROME
caps["pageLoadStrategy"] = "eager"
s = Service('C:webdriverschromedriver.exe')

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, desired_capabilities=caps, service=s)
url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qzKTbnhyhc'
driver.get(url)
driver.maximize_window()
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)

title_xpath = "//div[@class='style-scope ytd-video-primary-info-renderer']/h1"
alternative_title = "//*[@id='title']/h1"
v_title = ""
try:
    v_title = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, title_xpath))).text
except:
    v_title = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, alternative_title))).text

print("Title is " + v_title)
comments_xpath = "//div[@id='title']//*[@id='count']//span[1]"

driver.execute_script("window.scrollBy(0, arguments[0]);", 600)
try:
    v_comm_cnt = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, comments_xpath)))
except:
    pass
v_comm_cnt = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, comments_xpath).text
print("Video has " + v_comm_cnt + " comments")

The output is:

Title is Music for when you are stressed   Chil lofi | Music to Relax, Drive, Study, Chill
Video has 834 comments

Process finished with exit code 0

Answered By: Prophet

How to extract the comments count correctly

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