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pythonjsonpraw

PRAW: serializing Comment and Submission objects as JSON

I'm currently working on a reddit crawler using praw for some data mining purposes. I would like to crawl comments and submissions from subreddits and then save them in a database or file, preferably in a json format for use later. I am having trouble trying to serialize the comment and submission objects as JSON objects in python. Is there an existing method or way to do this? Note: I am also pretty new to python.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Solution

  • UPDATE ---------

    Looks like this is no longer possible, hat tip to Antoine

    https://github.com/praw-dev/praw/issues/701

    I'm not sure if there's a way to serialize what you need but you can save the submission ids with:

    some_id = sub.id

    and then retrieve them later on with

    r.get_submission(submission_id=some_id)

    EDIT -----------------------------------------

    So did a bit of research and found this: https://github.com/praw-dev/praw/issues/271

    So essentially you can turn on storing json with:

    r.config.store_json_result = True

    You can then access the json data with the json_dict member of the comment or submission.