How to send scraped data through reddit bot

Question

So I've got this bot that I want to use to reply with the box score of the mets game anytime someone says "mets score" on a specific subreddit. This is my first python project and I plan on using it on a dummy subreddit I created as a learning tool. I'm having trouble sending the scores from the website I scraped through the bot so it can appear in the reply to the "mets score" comments. Any suggestions?

import praw
import time
from lxml import html
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

r = praw.Reddit(user_agent = 'my_first_bot')
r.login('user_name', 'password')

def scores():
soup = BeautifulSoup(requests.get("http://scores.nbcsports.com/mlb/scoreboard.asp?day=20160621&meta=true").content, "lxml")

table = soup.find("a",class_="teamName", text="NY Mets").find_previous("table")
a, b = [a.text for a in table.find_all("a",class_="teamName")]
inn, a_score, b_score = ([td.text for td in row.select("td.shsTotD")] for row in table.find_all("tr"))
print (" ".join(inn))
print ("{}: {}".format(a, " ".join(a_score)))
print ("{}: {}".format(b, " ".join(b_score)))


words_to_match = ['mets score']
cache = []

def run_bot():
    print("Grabbing subreddit...")
    subreddit = r.get_subreddit("random_subreddit")
    print("Grabbing comments...")
    comments = subreddit.get_comments(limit=40)
    for comment in comments:
        print(comment.id)
        comment_text = comment.body.lower()
        isMatch = any(string in comment_text for string in words_to_match)
        if comment.id not in cache and isMatch:
            print("match found!"  + comment.id)
            comment.reply('heres the score to last nights mets game...' scores())
            print("reply successful")
            cache.append(comment.id)
            print("loop finished, goodnight")

while True:
    run_bot()
    time.sleep(120)

Answer 1

I think I'll just put you out of your misery ;). There are multiple issues with your code snippet:

comment.reply('heres the score to last nights mets game...' scores())

The .reply() method requires a string or an object that can have a good enough representation as a string. Assuming the method scores() returns a string, you should concatenate the two arguments, like this:

comment.reply('heres the score to last nights mets game...'+ scores())

It looks like your knowledge of basic python syntax and constructs is dusty. For a quick refresher see this.

Your method scores() doesn't return anything. It just prints out a bunch of lines (which I assume are for debugging purposes).

def scores():
    soup = BeautifulSoup(requests.get("http://scores.nbcsports.com/mlb/scoreboard.asp?day=20160621&meta=true").content, "lxml")
    .......    
    print (" ".join(inn))
    print ("{}: {}".format(a, " ".join(a_score)))
    print ("{}: {}".format(b, " ".join(b_score)))

Funnily enough you could use those exact strings for your return value (or maybe something else entirely, as suit your needs) like this:

def scores():
    .......
    inn_string = " ".join(inn)
    a_string = "{}: {}".format(a, " ".join(a_score))
    b_string = "{}: {}".format(b, " ".join(b_score))
    return "\n".join([inn_string, a_string, b_string])

These should get you up and running.

---

More advice: Have you read the Reddit PRAW docs? You should. You should also probably use praw.helpers.comment_stream(). It's simple and easy to use and will handle retrieving new comments for you. Currently you try and fetch a maximum of 40 comments every 120 seconds. What happens when there are more than that many relevant comments in that 120 second span. You'll end up missing some of the comments you should've replied to. .comment_stream() will take care of rate limiting for you so that your bot can reply to each new comment which needs its attention at its own pace. Read more about this here.