Reddit 101: A short tutorial on how to scrape data from Reddit

This is a very basic tutorial on scraping data from Reddit. Although it is written in python it does not require knowing it very well. The tutorial was created for people who will run the interactive notebooks in Google Colab but obviously it is possible to use it in Jupyter Notebook. However, the latter requires being a more advanced user who knows how to install packages on their local machine.

Google Colab

Users who want to use the tutorial online in Google Colab should follow these steps to access these interactive notebooks:

1. Go to www.colab.research.google.com (it is better to have a Google Account but not necessary).
2. Press GitHub in the popup window or press File and Open notebook.
3. Type MikoBie in the search box (compare the picture below).
4. Pick the relevant repository: reddit
5. Choose the relevant notebook and click Open Notebook.

That is it, an interactive notebook should open.

Jupyter Notebook

For more advanced users I recommend running this tutorial on their local machines. In the long shot, it will allow scraping more data because even though downloading a lot of data through Jupyter Notebook is an ill idea at least the environment for more advanced queries would be already created.

Main Dependencies

• python3.9 (anaconda distribution is preferred)
• other python dependencies are specified in requirenments.txt

Setup

1. Clone the repo: git@github.com:MikoBie/wgi.git
2. Set up the proper virtual environment with python3.9
3. Install all the dependencies from requirenments.txt