RedditAPIWrapper

This library provides a seamless python interface for accessing the unoffical Reddit API hosted by https://pushshift.io/. It includes functions for downloading arbitrarily large sets of comments and submissions subject to a number of search criteria.

If you intend to use this wrapper heavily, please consider supporting the API's maintainers.

Overview

The following functions access the https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/ endpoints and return the resulting JSON as a python dictionary.

• search_submissions fetches arbitrarily many submissions satisfying the search predicate
• count_submissions counts the number of submissions satisfying the search predicate
• search_comments fetches arbitrarily many comments satisfying the search predicate
• count_comments counts the number of comments satisfying the search predicate

Search Parameters

A search predicate is specified by the arguments passed to the functions listed above. The following table describes their usage. For any ranged argument, using None as either endpoint will yield an unbounded interval.

Argument	Data Type	Description
query	string	search term
title_query	string	search term (title only)
selftext_query	string	search term (body only)
ids	string list	base-36 submission/comment ids
count	integer	desired number of results (< 10^5)
fields	string list	desired JSON fields in return data
sort_attribute	string	name of attribute to sort by
sort_rev	boolean	sort in reverse order (i.e. descending)
authors	string list	usernames of authors
subreddits	string list	names of subreddits
time_range	(datetime, datetime)	range of values for time created
score_range	(integer, integer)	range of values for score
num_comments_range	(integer, integer)	range of values for the number of commments (on a submission)
printing	boolean	print a progress log to the console

Notes

• All arguments are optional, but there are no guarantees regarding the behavior of an underspecified query.
• Some arguments (e.g. title_query, num_comments_range) can only be used in functions relating to submissions.
• The function pretty_print (from Utilities.py) prints a given dictionary in an easily readable abbreviated form.

Examples

Complete example:

from PushshiftWrapper import *
from datetime import datetime, timedelta

results = search_submissions(
    query='trump',
    subreddits=['politics'],
    fields=['author', 'score', 'title'],
    time_range=(datetime(2020, 2, 16), None),   # February 16th to present
    count=3000
)

if results:
    print(f'Found {len(results)} submissions.')
    pretty_print(results)
else:
    print('No results found.')  # some network error probably occurred

Re-use the same arguments over multiple calls:

kwargs = {
    'query': 'trump',
    'score_range': [20, 30],
    'subreddits': ['factorio', 'politics']
}
comments = search_comments(**kwargs)
submissions = search_submissions(**kwargs, num_comments_range=[None, 100])

Manipulate datetime objects for constructing time ranges:

start = datetime(2020, 2, 16)
stop = start + timedelta(days=1)    # datetime.timedelta object
results = search_submissions(
    query='trump',
    subreddits=['politics'],
    time_range=(start, stop)
)