In preparation for the first set of analyses I'm planning for this blog, I spent some time over the last week preparing a package to create data sets from reddit. The package will collect comments and posts from specified subreddits within a custom date range and save it to a sqlite3 database for later analysis.

To do this, I've used PRAW, a python wrapper for the Reddit API. PRAW allows you to easily retrieve comments and posts from specific subreddits and users and gracefully handles Reddit's API usage limits. However, finding posts within a specific time range is much trickier.

PRAW/Reddit API Basics

This isn't intended as a tutorial for PRAW. If you want that, I recommend visiting their docs. This section will only go through the fundamentals of PRAW necessary to create a data set from reddit.

First, let's import praw and the redditDataset module

import praw import redditDataset

Next, let's initialize a connection with PRAW as follows:

redditObject = praw.Reddit(user_agent='get_reddit_dataset')

We can grab subreddits using getSubreddits . Here, we'll grab /r/funny and /r/gaming

subreddits = redditDataset.getSubreddits(redditObject, ['funny', 'gaming'])

PRAW also has a variety of functions to grab subreddits. One of the most useful is the method get_popular_subreddits .

popularSubreddits = redditObject.get_popular_subreddits(limit=200)

This will return a generator containing the 200 most popular subreddits. PRAW has many other methods to grab specific submissions, comments, users, etc., but these are the only ones you'll need to know to use the module.

Now that we have a reddit object and the subreddits to query, let's make a data set.

Grabbing a data set from a set of subreddits

Once you have a generator or list of subreddit objects and your praw object, call createDataset to start downloading comments and posts into a sqlite3 database. The database will be saved in ~\Databases\<dbName>db .

Let's grab all the posts from the funny subreddit from March 1, 2015:

funnySubreddit = redditDataset.getSubreddits(redditObject, ['funny']) redditDataset.createDataset(redditObject, funnySubreddit, startDate='150301000000' endDate='150301235959', dbName='March_01_2015_funny_posts' fineScale=4)

Basically, you give createDataset the reddit object, the subreddits (in list or generator form), a start and end date, a base name for the database, and a fine scale (which I'll get to in a moment).

For the start and end date, provide a string in the format 'yymmddHHMMSS'. So, in the above example, we're pulling posts between March 1, 2015 at 12:00:00 AM and March 1, 2015 at 11:59:59 PM.

Unfortunately, the reddit API will only provide a list of 1000 posts for any query. What does this mean for us? Well, say we want to get all the posts from 2014. If we request all those posts, we'll only get the 1000 with whatever sort is specified ( createDataset uses a 'top' sort). To get around this, createDataset will make many requests in increments of 'fineScale' hours. So, in the example, above, we'll actually make six separate queries for a theoretical maximum of 6,000 posts. Because of the overhead associated with getting posts, we want to set this parameter to be as large as possible while still getting all the data we want. I've found that 8 works well for all but the most frequented subreddits.

And that's it! It'll work to retrieve all the posts within the desired range and the top comments from each post (by default, this is set to 100). One thing to note: because of the reddit API limits, this process is slow. We can only make 30 requests per minute. Currently, we only get the data for one post per request. I think this can be improved (potentially up to 25 posts per request), but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Database structure

The sql database is pretty simple. It has two tables: submissions and comments .

Each row in submissions represents a single post. The columns contain the postID , postTitle , postBody (text if a self-post, url if a link), postScore (as of when it was downloaded), subredditName , and subredditID .

Each row in comments represents a single comment in a post. The columns contain the commentDate , user , body , comScore (as of when it was downloaded), and the postID .

How to grab posts within a specified time range

If you're just interested in using the package, you can skip this part. Figuring out how to grab posts within a time range was a bit of a pain as there's no native support for it in the reddit API or in PRAW. Reddit offers native support for filtering based on a set date range relative to now. So, for example, it's easy to grab posts from the last hour, day, week, month, or year, but challenging to grab posts from the month before last, or even the last month except for today. I spent a long time searching for an alternative with little success.

I eventually figured out that the reddit search engine accepts timestamp queries with the date provided in the unix time format. So, the search query timestamp:1425186000..1425229199 will return the 1000 posts sorted however you'd like (new, top, hot, relevance) from March 1, 2015. Importantly, this will not work using the default reddit search engine. You need to add syntax=cloudsearch to the end of the url to enable the native features of Amazon CloudSearch, one of which is timestamps.

Summary

You can check out the code for this project here. I've also collected a data set of almost all the posts along with their top 100 comments from the top 200 subreddits from March 2-8, 2015. You can get this database here.

Now that I have the data, it's time to start asking questions!