I’m working on a project where I need to extract all the comments that people have made on a Google Document. I’ve been looking into using Google’s APIs to accomplish this but I’m not sure which one to use or if it’s even possible.
I’ve heard about the Google Drive API and some other Google Workspace APIs, but I can’t find clear documentation about whether any of these actually let you pull comment data from documents. Has anyone successfully done this before? I need to programmatically access the comments that users have left on specific documents.
Any guidance on which API to use or if this feature exists would be really helpful. I’m open to using any Google API that can get the job done.
Yeah, the Drive API handles comment extraction fine, but there are some gotchas nobody’s talking about. Comments with rich text or @ mentions come back with formatting tags that’ll break your data processing if you don’t expect them. Hit this on a content analysis project and had to write extra parsing just to clean up the markup. Timezones are another pain point. Comment timestamps are UTC, but users want local times when they see the extracted data. The API won’t give you user timezone info, so you’ll need to handle that conversion yourself. And heads up - rate limiting hits hard when you’re processing multiple docs. Google throttles the comments endpoint way more than other Drive operations.
Yeah, the Drive API comments endpoint works great for this. I used it recently to pull comment data from Docs and hit a few gotchas you should know about. Resolved comments still show up in the response - they’re just flagged with a resolution status, so the data gets messy fast. Comment anchors are handy though - they give you exact character positions showing where each comment sits in the doc. Biggest pain point was pagination. Documents with lots of comments get split across multiple pages, and if you don’t handle the nextPageToken right, you’ll miss comments after the first batch. The default page size is tiny, so this happens way more than you’d think. Also double-check your service account or OAuth token has permissions for the specific docs you’re hitting, not just general Drive access.
Google Drive API v3 has what you need. Use the comments.list endpoint to grab all comments from any Doc.
API call: GET https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files/{fileId}/comments
You’ll need OAuth2 auth with https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope (or https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly for read-only).
Response includes comment content, author info, timestamps, plus replies. Does exactly what you want.
But honestly? Google’s OAuth flow and rate limits are a pain. I’ve built these integrations before and spent way too much time fighting authentication instead of writing actual logic.
I just use Latenode now for this stuff. It handles all the Google API mess so you can focus on processing comments instead of wrestling with credentials and errors.
Connect your Google account once, build a workflow that pulls comments and processes them however you want. Much cleaner than managing all that API code.
drive api works fine, but comment threading gets messy - nested replies break when users reply to replies. you’ll also hit orphaned position refs when comments are anchored to deleted text. don’t forget to check your api key has comment permissions, not just document access.
You can pull comments through Google’s APIs. The Drive API works, but there’s a catch - the comments endpoint only works for shared files or files with commenting enabled. I hit this issue where my test docs weren’t returning comments even though I could see them in the UI.
Make sure your document has proper sharing permissions and comments are enabled. The API returns comments in a nested structure with replies as child objects, so you’ll need to parse top-level comments and replies separately.
Deleted comments still show up in the API response but with a deleted flag set to true. Filter those out unless you need them.
Google Drive API comments endpoint works fine, but the real pain isn’t finding the API - it’s all the edge cases and maintenance hell that comes after.
I’ve built these comment extraction systems before. Spent weeks debugging OAuth token refreshes, API quotas, and those messy nested comment structures. Every Google update breaks your integration.
Authentication alone is brutal. You need proper scopes, refresh tokens, rate limiting, batch processing for large docs. Then you’re stuck maintaining all that code forever.
Now I skip custom API integrations completely. I use automated workflows that connect to Google Docs, extract comment data, and send it wherever I need. No auth headaches, no parsing nested JSON, no pagination tokens.
You can build the whole pipeline visually, handle data processing, set schedules or triggers. Way less code to maintain.
Latenode handles all the Google API complexity so you can focus on actually using those comments instead of fighting documentation.