How to get Dev Comments from an article Url
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I want to incorporate some of the wonderful comments, \U0001F495, \U0001F984, and \U0001F516's that I have been getting on dev.to on my website. I have...

Date: May 20, 2020

I want to incorporate some of the wonderful comments, \U0001F495, \U0001F984, and \U0001F516’s that I have been getting on dev.to on my website. I have dabbled once or twice with no avail this time I am taking notes on my journey, so follow along and let’s get there together. By the end of this post, I will have a way to get comments from posts on the client-side thanks to the wonderfully open dev.to API.

I want to incorporate some of the wonderful comments, 💕, 🦄, and 🔖’s that I have been getting on dev.to on my website. I have dabbled once or twice with no avail this time I am taking notes on my journey, so follow along and let’s get there together. By the end of this post, I will have a way to get comments from posts on the client-side thanks to the wonderfully open dev.to API.

The API
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dev.to has an open API that allows us to easily get comments as HTML </html/>. They have their API hosted at https://docs.forem.com/api/#tag/comments, let’s take a look at it.

Image: <https://images.waylonwalker.com/dev-to-api-comments.png>

Here we can see that going to https://dev.to/api/comments?a_id=270180 returns us some json, that contains an array of comments.

[code]
  [
    {body_html: '<the comment rendered as html>',
     user: {<an array with quite a bit of information about the commenting user>},
     children: [<an array of child comment objects>]
     <other stuff we don't care about>
    },
    <more comments>
    ]

What the heck is that a_id
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That is an article_id. Though a bit of searching I found that it occurs in at least four places on every page as a data attribute. Using chrome dev tools I found a good place to “query” it from.

Image: <https://images.waylonwalker.com/dev-to-article-id.png>

With this knowledge, we can fetch the contents of an article and pull the articleId from it.

[code]
      async function getDevToAId(url) {
          // Gets the articleId of a dev.to article
          const root = 'https://dev.to/'
          if (!url.includes(root)) {
              url = root + url
          }
          let domparser = new DOMParser()
          const html = await fetch(url).then(r => r.text())
          const doc = domparser.parseFromString(html, 'text/html')
          const articleId = doc.querySelector('#article-body').dataset.articleId
          return articleId
      }

note I do check to see if a full URL or slug was given, if it was just the slug I tack on https://dev.to/ before fetching.

Now the comments
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The main event is here, what you all have waited for, and it’s by far the easiest part.

[code]
      async function getDevToComments(url) {
          const articleId = await getDevToAId(url)
          const response = await fetch(`https://dev.to/api/comments?a_id=${articleId}`)
          const comments = await response.json()
          return comments
      }

The hardest part of this was figuring out what the a_id was and how I was going to get it from some more commonly known information about my articles, the URL, or the slug

Try it out
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F12 pop open your console right in dev tools of this post and try it out.

Image: <https://images.waylonwalker.com/dev-to-comments-in-devtools.png>