This tool has been developed with the purpose to mine reviews from the Google Play Store. It's entirely written in Java, and relies on Selenium and on PhantomJS.
The tool can save the reviews in a csv format as well storing them using a MongoDB instance.
First of all, you need to download (here) the right PhantomJS executable according to your underlying operating system. It have to be placed in the same directory of the jar and the properties file.
The tool must be set through its configuration file. You need to specify the input and the output file name.
Most parameters are self explained in the config.properties file. The most important ones are detailed in the following paragraph.
export_to=...
For this option you can select the option file or mongodb. The first one will save the reviews on a csv file, the second one will use a mongodb instance.
input_file=xxx.csv
This is the file with the list of app of which the reviews need to be extracted. The file need to report the package name of the app as the first field in the csv.
In order to start the reviews mining, you have to run the following command:
java -jar extractor.jar extractor=reviews
The tool will start to extract the reviews for the apps specified in the input_file parameter.
When you are collecting you reviews storing them on a mongodb database, you can export the reviews for the apps you are interested to with the following command:
java -jar extractor.jar extractor=export
You have specify the name of the csv file in output through the output_file field in the config.properties. Similarly, the input_file field should contain a list of the app for which you want to extract the reviews.
With this tool it is possible to mine user reviews in a format that is compatible with the SURF tool. To be able to do this, you need to setup che configuration file as follow:
extractor=reviews
export_to=file
format=surf
The ouput will be a review.xml file in the main directory where the command is launched.
The app in input are the ones listed in the input_file file.
Whether you are interested in mining a single application, you can run the tool with such command:
java -jar <name.jar> extractor=reviews app=<id_app>