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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T22:19:46+00:00

I’m using the YouTube API to get comments for a video with a parameterized

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I’m using the YouTube API to get comments for a video with a parameterized query like the following:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/theVideoID/comments?v=2&alt=json

The problem with this is that the maximum number of results you can get per query is 50. I want to get every comment. I’m currently using the start-index and max-results parameters to solve this. I had a bit of trouble doing iterations of 50 at a time because sometimes the iteration would have a start-index above the number of comments and I couldn’t figure that out, so I just tried to work out one at a time. It may be better to do 50 at a time, so let me know if that is the better solution. For now:

I’m using PHP to get the amount of comments:

<?php
    $video_ID = 'gT2HYxOdxUk';
    $JSON = file_get_contents("https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/{$video_ID}?v=2&alt=json");
    $JSON_Data = json_decode($JSON);
    $commentCount = $JSON_Data->{'entry'}->{'gd$comments'}->{'gd$feedLink'}->{'countHint'};
?>

And then I’m calling a JavaScript/jQuery function to load all comments into an array. For testing, it prints them into a div. For starters, here’s how I’m calling the function:

<body onLoad="loadComments('<?php echo $commentCount; ?>', '<?php echo $video_ID; ?>')">

Next, the actual function:

function loadComments(count, videoID) {     
    for(i = 1; i <= count; i++) {
        $.ajax({
            url: "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/" + videoID + "/comments?v=2&alt=json&max-results=1" + "&start-index=" + i,
            dataType: "jsonp",
            success: function(data){
                $.each(data.feed.entry, function(key, val) {
                    comments.push(val.content.$t);
                    $('#commentOutput').append(val.content.$t + '<br>'); //Just for testing purposes.
                });
            }

        });
    }
}

The problem is that it is really iffy. When I use the count variable as the terminating part of the for loop like this, it always gets like, for example, 45 out of 211 comments. If I manually enter 211, it will go to around 195. If I put in a low number, like 1-15, it pretty much always gets them all. 20+, it’s never right.

I need to figure out how to get this to consistently get all the comments of a given video by taking advantage of the max-results and start-index parameters. Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I just came across this question and I notice that its been quite some time when this was asked. But since nobody answered it yet, I think I should do that.

    What you should ideally do is, use Youtube’s PHP API (using Zend_GData) and use the following code in PHP:

    <?php

    require_once 'Zend/Loader.php'; // the Zend dir must be in your include_path
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata_YouTube');

$yt = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube();
$yt->setMajorProtocolVersion(2);
$video = parse_url("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ob8sr9ZX0");
parse_str(urldecode($video['query']), $query);
$videoId = $query['v'];

$commentFeed = $yt->retrieveAllEntriesForFeed($yt->getVideoCommentFeed($videoId));

foreach ($commentFeed as $commentEntry) {
    echo "Full text: " . $commentEntry->content->text . "<br />";
}

    The key element here is the retrieveAllEntriesForFeed() method.

    Instead of echo-ing all the comments, you can construct a JSON and send it back to the waiting Javascript.

    It does not use the max-results or start-index, but does the job well without them.

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