Pytube library, getting error in video.description

Question

from pytube import YouTube

video = YouTube('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDKSwtKhteE')
print('Author: ' + video.author)
print('Title: ' + video.title)
print('Description: ' + video.description)

Hello!

I'm trying to get a video description from a Youtube video using Pytube library in Python.

When I try to get the description I get this error

print('Description: ' + video.description)
          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "NoneType") to str

Pytube is giving me a 'None' but, why?

Any thoughts?

Thank you.

This script was working a year ago, now I have Pytube v15. I read the Pytube documentation but nothing new I found on it https://pytube.io/en/latest/api.html#pytube.YouTube.description

Answer 1

Unfortunately, as stated in this issue of PyTube, there is a bug in PyTube that makes it unable to show descriptions. The only way is to write another function that fetches the description. Per this comment, the function can be implemented like this:

from json import loads
from pytube import YouTube

def get_description(video: YouTube) -> str:
    i: int = video.watch_html.find('"shortDescription":"')
    desc: str = '"'
    i += 20  # excluding the `"shortDescription":"`
    while True:
        letter = video.watch_html[i]
        desc += letter  # letter can be added in any case
        i += 1
        if letter == '\\':
            desc += video.watch_html[i]
            i += 1
        elif letter == '"':
            break
    return loads(desc)

Putting it together:

from pytube import YouTube
from json import loads

def get_description(video: YouTube) -> str:
    i: int = video.watch_html.find('"shortDescription":"')
    desc: str = '"'
    i += 20  # excluding the `"shortDescription":"`
    while True:
        letter = video.watch_html[i]
        desc += letter  # letter can be added in any case
        i += 1
        if letter == '\\':
            desc += video.watch_html[i]
            i += 1
        elif letter == '"':
            break
    return loads(desc)

video = YouTube('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDKSwtKhteE')
print('Author: ' + video.author)
print('Title: ' + video.title)
print('Description: ' + get_description(video))  # HERE!