I am using PRAW to make a reddit bot that takes the comment author of someone who says "alot" and stores their username into a list. I am having troubles with the regular expression and how to get the string to work. Here is my code.
#importing praw for reddit api and time to make intervals
import praw
import time
import re
username = "LewisTheRobot"
password =
r = praw.Reddit(user_agent = "Counts people who say alot")
word_to_match = ['\balot\b']
storage = []
r.login(username, password)
def run_bot():
subreddit = r.get_subreddit("test")
print("Grabbing subreddit")
comments = subreddit.get_comments(limit=200)
print("Grabbing comments")
for comment in comments:
comment_text = comment.body.lower()
isMatch = any(string in comment_text for string in word_to_match)
if comment.id not in storage and isMatch:
print("Match found! Storing username: " + str(comment.author) + " into list.")
storage.append(comment.author)
print("There are currently: " + str(len(storage)) + " people who use 'alot' instead of ' a lot'.")
while True:
run_bot()
time.sleep(5)
so the regular expression I am using looks for the word alot instead of alot as part of a string. Example zealot. Whenever I run this, it will not find a comment that I have made. Any suggestions?
You're checking with string operations, not RE ones, in
isMatch = any(string in comment_text for string in word_to_match)
The first in here checks for a substring -- nothing to do with REs.
Change this to
isMatch = any(re.search(string, comment_text) for string in word_to_match)
Moreover, you have an error in your initialization:
word_to_match = ['\balot\b']
'\b' is the character with code 0x08 (backspace). Always use raw string syntax for RE patterns, to avoid such traps:
word_to_match = [r'\balot\b']
Now you'll have a couple of characters, backslash then b, which RE will interpret to mean "word boundary".
There may be other bugs but I try not to look for more than two bugs per question...:-)