Web scraping is a technique used to extract data from websites. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to scrape Reddit using Python. Reddit is a popular social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. We’ll be using the mechanicalsoup library to navigate the website, requests to send HTTP requests, and BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML content.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following libraries installed:

• mechanicalsoup
• requests
• beautifulsoup4

You can install them using pip:

pip install mechanicalsoup requests beautifulsoup4

Step 1: Import Required Libraries

import mechanicalsoup
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv
import json

Step 2: Connect to Reddit

# Connect to Website
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
access_token = 'L5vC54n13B7pI8ZYNh' # Get your access token from app.quickscraper.co
url = f"https://api.quickscraper.co/parse?access_token={access_token}&url=https://www.reddit.com/r/CHIBears/comments/1b7bmol/500_nfl_players_from_memory/"
page = browser.get(url)

In the provided code, we’re using an access token from a service called quickscraper.co. This service allows us to bypass anti-scraping measures implemented by Reddit. The url variable contains the URL to fetch the desired Reddit post.

Step 3: Parse HTML Content

# Parse HTML
page = BeautifulSoup(page.content, 'html.parser')

Step 4: Extract Data

post_items = []

title = page.find('h1', id=lambda x: x and 'post-title-t3' in x).text.strip()
description = page.find('div', id=lambda x: x and 'post-rtjson-content' in x).text.strip()
author = page.find('faceplate-tracker', attrs={'source': 'post_credit_bar'}).text.strip()

print(author)

foundItem = {
    "title": title,
    "description": description,
    "author": author,
}
post_items.append(foundItem)

We’re using the find method from BeautifulSoup to locate the HTML elements containing the desired data. The id and attrs parameters help us identify the specific elements based on their HTML structure.

Step 5: Save Data to a JSON File

with open("post_items.json", "w") as file:
    json.dump(post_items, file, indent=4)

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned how to scrape Reddit using Python. We covered the necessary libraries, connecting to the website, parsing HTML content, extracting data, and saving the data to a JSON file.

Keep in mind that web scraping can be against the terms of service of some websites, and you should always check the website’s policies before scraping. Additionally, websites may implement anti-scraping measures, which might require you to find ways to bypass them, such as using services like quickscraper.co or proxies.

Happy scraping!