Today we are going to see how we can scrape Reddit posts using Python and BeautifulSoup is a simple and elegant manner.
This article aims to get you started on a real-world problem solving while keeping it super simple, so you get familiar and get practical results as fast as possible.
So the first thing we need is to make sure we have Python 3 installed. If not, you can just get Python 3 and get it installed before you proceed.
Then you can install beautiful soup.
We will also need the library's requests, lxml, and soupsieve to fetch data, break it down to XML, and to use CSS selectors. Install them using.
Now let's go to the programming subreddit and inspect the data we can get.
This is how it looks.
Back to our code now. Let's try and get this data by pretending we are a browser like this.
Save this as reddit_bs.py.
If you run it
You will see the whole HTML page.
Now, let's use CSS selectors to get to the data we want. To do that, let's go back to Chrome and open the inspect tool. You can see that all the post title elements have a class called review-title in them.
Once installed, open an editor and type in.
Let's use CSS selectors to get this data like so.
This will print the title of the first post's title. We now need to get to all the posts. We notice that the
with the class 'Post' (amongst others) holds all the individual data together.
To get to them individually, we run through them like this and try and get to the post title from 'inside' the 'Post.'
And when you run it, you get.
Bingo!! We got the post titles.
Now with the same process, we get the class names of all the other data like post votes, the number of comments, link to it, etc.
That, when run, should print everything we need from each post like this.
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