Using iOS Shortcuts and JavaScript To Extract RSS Feed URLs From YouTube

A few months ago, I got into RSS readers. Given how much YouTube I watch along with YouTube’s broken subscription tab, I wondered if YouTube had RSS feeds. Turns out it does, but they aren’t advertised. Even with an RSS reader that discovers feeds, it only works for certain pages. So I decided to use iOS Shortcuts to do it for me.

Overview

The shortcut will works like this:

1. Parse the URL for the Channel or Playlist ID and return the feed URL
2. If step 1 works, ask the user if they want to copy the URL. If so, copy it.
3. If step 2 doesn’t work, notify the user.

In this post, I’ll focus on 1.

The JavaScript

I expected to do a lot of DOM manipulation and web scraping, but the URL has everything I need. All the feed URLs build on the URL https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?.

Youtube has another URL scheme like youtube.com/c/username but the only way to get the RSS feed for it is to use YouTube’s API on the username. This is not the same as the user_id.

The Code

Nothing too exciting although I did learn about URL parsing using window.location and URLSearchParams.

const YOUTUBE_DOMAINS = ["m.youtube.com","youtu.be", "www.youtube.com"];
const BASE_FEED_URL = "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?";
const pathArr = window.location.pathname.split("/");
const searchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
const playlistID = searchParams.get("list");

if (YOUTUBE_DOMAINS.indexOf(window.location.hostname) === -1) {
    completion("Non Playlist/Channel");
}
if (playlistID){
    let playlistFeedURL = `${BASE_FEED_URL}playlist_id=${playlistID}`;
    completion(playlistFeedURL);
} else {
    let basePath = pathArr[1];
    if(basePath === "channel") {
       let channelID = pathArr[2];
       let channelFeedURL = `${BASE_FEED_URL}channel_id=${channelID}`;
       completion(channelFeedURL);
    } else if ("user" === basePath){
        let user = pathArr[2];
        let userFeedURL = `${BASE_FEED_URL}user=${user}`;
        completion(userFeedURL);
    } else {
      completion("Non Playlist/Channel");
    }
}
completion(playlistID);

Also note the completion function. This is needed to pass arguments along the shortcut.

Conclusion

You can discover the full shortcut here. **Note 10 October 2022: **The shortcut doesn’t exist anymore and it’ll be part of my project YouTube x RSS once I get around to making it again.