Web Scraping Reddit

Web scraping /r/MachineLearning with BeautifulSoup and Selenium, without using the Reddit API, since you mostly web scrape when an API is not available -- or just when it's easier.

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Features

• [x] App can scrape most of the available data, as can be seen from the database diagram.
• [x] Choose subreddit and filter
• [x] Control approximately how many posts to collect
• [x] Headless browser. Run this app in the background and do other work in the mean time.

Future improvements

This app is not robust (enough). There are extremely many edge cases in web scraping, and this would be something to improve upon in the future.

Pull requests are welcome.

• [ ] Get rid of as many varchars in comment table as possible; use int for higher quality data.
• [ ] Make app robust
• [ ] Download driver automatically
• [ ] Add more browsers for running this project (Firefox first)
• [ ] Give categories and flairs their own table, right now they are just concatenated into a string.

Install

To run this project, you need to have the following (besides Python 3+):

1. Chrome browser installed on your computer.
2. Paste this into your address bar in Chrome chrome://settings/help. Download the corresponding chromedriver version here.
3. Place the chromerdriver in the core folder of this project.
4. Install the packages from requirements.txt file by pip install -r requirements.txt

After these steps, you can run scraper.py to scrape and store the reddit data in an sqlite database. It's recommended to download DB Browser For SQLite to browse the database. If you want to pull out the data, you should use make_dataset.py. For a last demonstration, we can run a Machine Learning project using mlproj.py.

Note: If your Chrome browser automatically updates to a new version, the chromedriver that you downloaded will almost surely not work, after an automatic update.