YouTube Search Automation

Today is Saturday and it’s the fourteenth day of my self-quarantine. I woke up a bit late and I got the news that the IMF has declared, we are in a recession now. I open my Mac. As I open it, the first thing that came in my mind is to watch the latest updates of the financial market and related news. I was being lazy and there comes the father of all evil, an idea. An idea to automate the process of (1) opening youtube, (2) start typing (worst thing for a morning mood) and (3) Click on Search, to get the market news. And what next, I kept everything aside and start working on it.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Install Selenium:

pip install -U selenium

For some Mac users, it can also be:

pip3 install selenium

or

sudo pip3 install selenium

Confirm it is there:

pip freeze

Install Homebrew:

Either: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
or:
https://devopscraft.com/how-to-install-homebrew-on-macos-catalina/

After installing Homebrew, we need to get ChromeDrive:

brew tap homebrew/cask && brew cask install chromedriver

Import Webdriver:

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

Navigate to URL:

driver.get(“https://www.youtube.com")

Go to Search Box and Type

Get the xpath id from the YouTube → Inspect → Select Elementwise inspection

Select the typing portion and get the id by right-clicking in the highlighted code and select by_xpath.

searchbox = driver.find_element_by_xpath(‘//*[@id=”search”]’)
searchbox.send_keys(‘Market Updates ET’)

Similarly, get the id for the Search Click button by selecting exactly the search symbol.

Click on the Search Button

SearchButton = driver.find_element_by_xpath(‘//*[@id=”search-icon-legacy”]/yt-icon’)
SearchButton.click()

And it’s done.

There is plenty of scope of improvement but for now, it serves my purpose and will make my morning smoother. Now, I won’t need to worry about my personalized news every morning, with one command, I will have my news ready.

Thanks to Python ;)

References:

• No module named selenium: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48267633/python-no-module-named-selenium
• Installing Homebrew: https://devopscraft.com/how-to-install-homebrew-on-macos-catalina/
• Getting ChromeDriver: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver