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Developer API: Introduction
Getting Started

First, you must have a developer ID. If you do not have one, you can request one by creating a developer profile.

As a sneak preview of the ease-of-use of the API, request the following URL in your web browser to request your own user profile:

http://www.youtube.com/api2_rest?method=youtube.users.get_profile&dev_id=YOUR_DEV_ID&user=YOUTUBE_USER_NAME

You should see results like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ut_response status="ok">
        <user_profile>
                <first_name>YouTube</first_name>
                <last_name>User</last_name>
                <about_me>YouTube rocks!!</about_me>
                <age>30</age>
                <video_upload_count>7</video_upload_count>
                .... and more ....
        </user_profile>
</ut_response>

To maintain backward-compatibility, we have retained the older XML-based API. The older documentation can be found here.

Result Format

All API calls return an XML document. Successful API calls return an XML document of the following form:

<ut_response status="ok">
    ... response XML document ...
<ut_response>

Failed API calls return an XML document as follows:

<ut_response status="fail">
        <error>
                <code>7</code>
                <description>Missing dev_id parameter.</description>
        </error>
</ut_response>

The code element provides the machine-friendly error code that your application can use to determine the error type and handle it appropriately. The description element provides you with a human-readable description of the error.

API Call Interfaces

There are two styles of API calls that you can mix-and-match at your convenience, REST and XML-RPC

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