Open first video by searching in youtube, using Python

Question

I try this and don't know how to open the first video. This code opens the search in the browser.

import webbrowser

def findYT(search):
    words = search.split()

    link = "http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query="

    for i in words:
        link += i + "+"

    time.sleep(1)
    webbrowser.open_new(link[:-1])

This successfully searches the video, but how do I open the first result?

Does this answer your question? [Call to operating system to open url?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4216985/call-to-operating-system-to-open-url) — Joshua Varghese, Apr 10 '20 at 10:05
no thanks, I think, I must find the first video's link in HTML document, by parsing it.. but I want easy way) — Aram Khachatryan, Apr 10 '20 at 10:08
no, it searching, this code is working, I need to continue and add the part to open the first result link, I need any function or library — Aram Khachatryan, Apr 10 '20 at 10:11
your code literally opens the search in the browser. you cant get the first link unless you parse it — Joshua Varghese, Apr 10 '20 at 10:13
You should not be asking someone to do something for you. Rather give your attempts to solve it and request when you are unable to succeed in your attempts. Please share your attempts on `parsing` the outcomes. — Asif Ali, Apr 10 '20 at 10:22

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 10 '20 at 10:50

The most common approach would be to use two very popular libraries: requests and BeautifulSoup. requests to get the page, and BeautifulSoup to parse it.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import webbrowser

def findYT(search):
    words = search.split()

    search_link = "http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=" + '+'.join(words)
    search_result = requests.get(search_link).text
    soup = BeautifulSoup(search_result, 'html.parser')
    videos = soup.select(".yt-uix-tile-link")
    if not videos:
        raise KeyError("No video found")
    link = "https://www.youtube.com" + videos[0]["href"]

    webbrowser.open_new(link)

Note that it is recommended not to use uppercases in python while naming variables.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 10 '20 at 10:56

1

To do that you have to webscrape. Python can´t see what is on your screen. You have to webscrape the youtube page you are searching and then you can open the first <a> that comes up for example. ('' is a url tag in html)

Things you need for that:

BeautifulSoup or selenium for example
requests

That should be all that you need to do what you want.

edited Apr 10 '20 at 10:56

Joshua Varghese

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answered Apr 10 '20 at 10:14

Whoozy

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Open first video by searching in youtube, using Python

2 Answers2

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