vosonSML (version 0.32.7)

Collect.youtube: Collect comments data for YouTube videos

Description

This function collects public comments data for one or more YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API v3 and structures the data into a dataframe with the class names "datasource" and "youtube".

YouTube has a quota unit system as a rate limit with most developers having either 10,000 or 1,000,000 units per day. Many read operations cost a base of 1 unit such as retrieving individual comments, plus 1 or 2 units for text snippets. Retrieving threads or top-level comments with text costs 3 units per request (maximum 100 comments per request). Using this function a video with 250 top-level comments and 10 of those having reply comments of up to 100 each, should cost (9 + 20) 29 quota units and return between 260 and 1260 total comments. There is currently a limit of 100 reply comments collected per top-level comment.

More information about the YouTube Data API v3 can be found here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started

Usage

# S3 method for youtube
Collect(
  credential,
  videoIDs = c(),
  verbose = FALSE,
  writeToFile = FALSE,
  maxComments = 1e+10,
  ...
)

Value

A tibble object with class names "datasource" and "youtube".

Arguments

credential

A credential object generated from Authenticate with class name "youtube".

videoIDs

Character vector. Specifies YouTube video URLs or IDs. For example, if the video URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxx then use URL or ID videoIDs = c("xxxxxxxxxxx").

verbose

Logical. Output additional information about the data collection. Default is FALSE.

writeToFile

Logical. Write collected data to file. Default is FALSE.

maxComments

Numeric integer. Specifies how many top-level comments to collect from each video. This value does not consider replies to top-level comments. The total number of comments returned for a video will usually be greater than maxComments depending on the number of reply comments present.

...

Additional parameters passed to function. Not used in this method.

Examples

if (FALSE) {
# list of YouTube video urls or ids to collect
video_ids <- c("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx",
               "https://youtu.be/xxxxxxxx",
               "xxxxxxx")

# collect approximately 200 threads/comments for each YouTube video
youtubeData <- youtubeAuth |>
  Collect(videoIDs = video_ids, writeToFile = TRUE, verbose = FALSE, maxComments = 200)
}