2 min read

Get Youtube channel RSS

Screenshot of the Shortcut implementation in macOS

I'm an avid user of RSS, and Readwise Reader is my main funneling tool given its ability to combine read-it-later features with an RSS reader while simultaneously acting as a good citizen in a pipeline of highlighting. One use case that has grown in me over the last year is highlighting YouTube videos, and as a result, the "subscribe" concept has become more meaningful to me. Now, if you want to expand that subscription and include it in a routine similar to mine, you'll notice that finding the URL for the RSS feed for a certain channel is tricky. Luckily, there are some workarounds and some tools  that can extract and construct the desired url, but the "maldición" of developers appears to be too lazy to be lazy, so "not many steps" are too many steps sometimes, so much so that I had to make a shortcut to try to even minimize the effort.

Basically, this regex, the composition of the final URL, and some added niceties like copying directly to the clipboard are all there is

///The expected URL:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
(externalId|data-channel-external-id)"\s*:\s*"([^"]+)

Regex to extract the required CHANNEL_ID

If you are still engaged to this point, you can find it here:

Shortcut menubar screenshot when the process is done
Screenshot notification after running the shortcut on Flula's channel (https://www.youtube.com/@flula)
⚠️
If you find that the shortcut returns the same URL when ran on different channels, this appears to be caused by a bug in Shortcuts caching mechanism. Try refreshing the page before running the shortcut again.

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https://danielmiessler.com/p/rss-feed-youtube-channel/