How to print Instaloader data to CSV?

Question

I'm not sure the root of this problem - ultimately, I'm trying to retrieve the followers of an Instagram account ("strengthinsheets") and their number of followers.

There are no issues with the data -- however, I originally tried to use Gspread and send it right to a Google Sheet. This seemed to time out regularly.

Now, I'm just trying to print the info to a CSV -- the below script will give me the correct results (not in a CSV):

import csv
from turtle import pd
import instaloader

headers = {

    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.79 Safari/537.36'
}

loader = instaloader.Instaloader()

loader.login("username", "password!")

profile = instaloader.Profile.from_username(loader.context, "strengthinsheets")

followees = profile.get_followees()

for followee in profile.get_followees():
    print((followee.full_name, followee.username, followee.followees))

However, in order to make this work daily, I'm thinking it would be best to just save all the data to a CSV. I tried altering in this way:

import csv
from turtle import pd
import instaloader

headers = {

    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.79 Safari/537.36'
}

loader = instaloader.Instaloader()

loader.login("username", "password!")

profile = instaloader.Profile.from_username(loader.context, "strengthinsheets")

followees = profile.get_followees()

for followee in profile.get_followees():
    (followee.full_name, followee.username, followee.followees)

with open('followers.csv', 'w') as file:
    writer = csv.writer(file)
    writer.writerows(followee)

I'm not 100% positive I extracted to a CSV correctly, I based my code off documentation I found online, but it was confusing (I previously did it with .to_csv when pulling dataframes, but couldn't get that working this way).. I'm new to this, but would really love a file like this - it seems very attainable but if I'm wrong would love to hear it from an expert.

I don't understand what is your problem. – furas Sep 20 '22 at 04:00 — furas, Sep 20 '22 at 04:00

furas · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-20T04:09:21.713

I don't know what is your problem ...

... but I would write it inside for-loop using writerow() (without char s at the end).

with open('followers.csv', 'w') as file:
    writer = csv.writer(file)
    writer.writerow("full_name", "username", "followees")  # header
    for followee in profile.get_followees():
        writer.writerow( (followee.full_name, followee.username, followee.followees) )

Or first I would create list with all rows and later use writerows() (with s at the end)

all_followees = []

for followee in profile.get_followees():
    all_followees.append( (followee.full_name, followee.username, followee.followees) )
 
with open('followers.csv', 'w') as file:
    writer = csv.writer(file)
    writer.writerow("full_name", "username", "followees")  # header
    writer.writerows( all_followees )

and the same with DataFrame

all_followees = []

for followee in profile.get_followees():
    all_followees.append( (followee.full_name, followee.username, followee.followees) )
 
df = pd.DataFrame(all_followees, columns=("full_name", "username", "followees"))

df.to_csv('followers.csv', index=False)

How to print Instaloader data to CSV?

1 Answers1