How To Scrape Reddit Using Python

People can easily gather and scrape information from multiple sources such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. You can think of a scraper as a specialized tool that extracts data from a web page accurately and quickly. The scraping APIs help the scrapers avoid getting banned by anti-scraping techniques that the websites place. However, it is expensive to use APIs as compared to a proxy tool managed by yourself.

Reddit has an API called the Python Reddit API Wrapper, shortened for PRAW, to crawl data. In this blog, I will be showing you steps on how to scrape Reddit using python. But before that, you need to know why you have to scrape Reddit.

If we talk about the design of Reddit, then it is broken into several communities known as “subreddits.” You can find any subreddit of your topic of interest on the Internet. The social researchers run analysis, make inferences, and implement actionable plans when they extract Reddit discussions for a particular topic. 

You can scrape a lot of data points from Reddit, such as:

You can scrape any information from Reddit relevant to your business because of the following needs:

For instance, 

Reddit scraping uses web scrapers (computer programs) to extract publicly available data from the Reddit website. You need to use the Reddit scrapers because of the limitations you are bound to face when using the official Reddit API. However, if you use the web scraper that does not use the Reddit API to extract data from Reddit, you will violate the Reddit terms of use. But it does not mean that web scraping is illegal.

To have a hitch-free scraping session, you will have to evade the anti-scraping systems put in place by Reddit. The most common anti-scraping techniques used by Reddit are:

You can solve the problem of IP tracking with the help of proxies and IP rotation. On the other hand, you can solve the problem of Captchas by using Captcha solves such as 2Captcha.

There are five ways to scrape Reddit, and they are:

Let’s see how we can scrape Reddit using the Reddit API with the help of the following steps.

First, we will import Pandas built-in modules i-e., datetime, and two third-party modules, PRAW and Pandas, as shown below:

import praw
import pandas as pd
import datetime as dt

You can access the Reddit data using Praw, which stands for Python Reddit API Wrapper. First, you need to connect to Reddit by calling the  praw.Reddit function and storing it in a variable. Afterward, you have to pass the following arguments to the function.

reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id='PERSONAL_USE_SCRIPT_14_CHARS', \
                     client_secret='SECRET_KEY_27_CHARS ', \
                     user_agent='YOUR_APP_NAME', \
                     username='YOUR_REDDIT_USER_NAME', \
                     password='YOUR_REDDIT_LOGIN_PASSWORD')

subreddit = reddit.subreddit('Nootropics')

Each subreddit has the below five different ways to organize the topics created by Redditors:

You can grab the most up-voted topics as:

top_subreddit = subreddit.top()

You will get a list-like object having the top 100 submissions in r/Nootropics. However, Reddit’s request limit is 1000, so you can control the sample size by passing a limit to .top as:

top_subreddit = subreddit.top(limit=600)

You can scrape any data you want. However, we will be scraping the below information about the topics:

We will do this by storing our data in a dictionary and then using a for loop as shown below.

topics_dict = { "title":[], \
                "score":[], \
                "id":[], "url":[], \
                "created": [], \
                "body":[]}

Now, we can scrape the data from the Reddit API. We will append the information to our dictionary by iterating through our top_subreddit object.

for submission in top_subreddit:
    topics_dict["id"].append(submission.id)
    topics_dict["title"].append(submission.title)
    topics_dict["score"].append(submission.score)
    topics_dict["created"].append(submission.created)
    topics_dict["body"].append(submission.selftext)

Now, we put our data into Pandas Dataframes as Python dictionaries are not easy to read.

topics_data = pd.DataFrame(topics_dict)

It is very easy to create data files in various formats in Pandas, so we use the following lines of code to export our data to a CSV file.

topics_data.to_csv('FILENAME.csv', index=False)

You know that Reddit is not much of a strict website when it comes to proxy usage restrictions. But you can be caught and penalized if you automate your actions on Reddit without using proxies. 

So, let’s look at some of the best proxies for Reddit that fall into two categories:

Following are some of the top residential and datacenter proxies for Reddit.

ProxyScrape provides three types of services to its users i-e., 

You need proxies when you are working with some automatic tools on Reddit. It’s because Reddit is a very sensitive website that easily detects automatic actions and blocks your IP from accessing the platform.  So, if you are automating some of the tasks like votes, posts, joining/unjoining groups, and managing more than one account, you definitely need to use proxies to avoid bad outcomes.

You can go for manual scraping if your Reddit scraping requirements are small. But if the requirements get large, you have to leverage automated scraping methodologies such as web scraping tools and custom scripts. The web scrapers prove to be cost and resource-efficient when your daily scraping requirements are within a few million posts.

So, let’s look at some of the best Reddit scrapers as the best solution to scrape large amounts of Reddit data.