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Users with a certain reputation, can see deleted answers (deleted either by moderators or by their owners themselves).

Does the API offer any means to access such deleted answers?

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This question is nearly a duplicate of: Provide a way to retrieve questions and answers that have been deleted -- which has been "status planned" for 6+ years.

In general, it is very hard to search for answers in the API; everything's geared towards questions -- especially the /search and /search/advanced.

There is no way to search for deleted answers, even ones you have permission to see.
For example, stackoverflow.com/search?q=is:answer deleted:yes tells me I have 165 deleted answers and, also:

Note: only content you own is returned when searching for deleted content


But when I try the API:
          /2.2/search/advanced?q=is:answer deleted:yes (with an appropriate filter set)

It gives me 14,884,687 questions (that's all of them) irregardless of whether I have an answer to the Q or not.

And, when I use /questions/{ids}/answers to search a question where I know I have a deleted answer, the results only show me the undeleted answers. (Note that I exceed 10K rep on that site and can see any deleted content that I stumble across.)

Finally the answer object does not have any sort of property like deleted, deletion_date, etc. So, clearly, the current API was not meant to support deleted answers.

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    Note to self: Should retest some day using API 2.3 and an access_token.
    – Brock Adams
    Commented Nov 12, 2018 at 4:46

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