python praw get comment and write in file format

Question

I'm getting a subreddit's contents. The subreddit is AR. I need to get post ID, title, post content, author, post date, score, comments, and comment ID, then write into txt file. The problems I'm facing now are:

(1) Can I combine comments and comment ID into one file? Thus, it will be post ID, title, post content, author, post date, score, comments, and comment ID (2) The selftext I got has breaklines, so in my output.txt shows like

blablabla

blablabla

blablabla

For example, [this reddit][1] has multiple breaklines. I want the content all in one line because the data will be transferred into csv/excel for future analysis.

My code:

import praw, datetime, os
reddit = praw.Reddit('bot1')
subreddit = reddit.subreddit('AR')
for submission in subreddit.top(limit=1):
    date = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(submission.created_utc)

    for comment in submission.comments:
        print("Comment author: ", comment.author)
        print("Comments: ", comment.body)
        indexFile_comment = open('path' + 'index_comments.txt', 'a+')
        indexFile_comment.write('"' + str(comment.author) + '"' + ', ' + '"' + str(comment.body) + '"' + '\n')
    print("Post ID: ", submission.id)
    print("Title: ", submission.title)
    print("Post Content: ", submission.selftext)
    print("User Name: ", submission.author)
    print("Post Date: ", date)
    print("Point: ", submission.score)
    indexFile = open('path' + 'index.txt', 'a+')
    indexFile.write('"' + str(submission.id) + '"' + ', ' + '"' + str(submission.title) + '"' + ', ' + '"' + str(submission.selftext) + '"' + ', ' + '"' + str(submission.author) + '"' + ', ' + '"' + str(date) + '"' + ', ' + '"' + str(submission.score) + '"' + '\n')
    print ("Successfuly writing in file")
    indexFile.close()

To get the self text into one line you could replace `\n` with a space, like this `str.replace("\n", " ")`. I do not understand what you mean by combine the comments and the comment ID however, can you please explain that for me? — PeskyPotato, Jul 05 '17 at 12:04
How do I apply str.replace into the selftext code? Comments and comment id will just listing following by post ID, title, post content, author, post date, score. So it will look like: post ID, title, selftext, author, date, score, comment ID 1, comment ID 1's comment, comment ID 2, comment ID 2's comment, and so on. — Michael Lin, Jul 05 '17 at 14:49
I fix it by using str(submission.selftext.replace("\n", " ")) — Michael Lin, Jul 05 '17 at 15:13

PeskyPotato · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-07T19:54:39.687

To get the submission in one line you can implement st.replace("\n"," ") in your code. Where the variable st is submission.selftext.

To get the comment ID you could do comment.id and to get the body comment.body within your for loop.

Edit:

In the first line, I have only added submission.id and submission.title but you can add the rest in the same manner. The loop adds the comments to end of the same string. After the for loop the I replace any new line characters with a space character. You can write record to a text file and when you go to the next submission you and append the next record to a new line in the text file.

record = str(submission.id) + " " + str(submission.title) + " " 
for comment in submission.comments:
    record = record + comment.author + " " + comment.body + " "
record.replace("\n", " ")

I know how to get comment id and body, but is it possible to put them all in one line in a txt file? post ID, title, selftext, author, date, score, comment ID 1, comment ID 1's comment, comment ID 2, comment ID 2's comment — Michael Lin, Jul 06 '17 at 19:29

python praw get comment and write in file format

1 Answers1