psaw 0.0.1

100 most recent submissions

# The `search_comments` and `search_submissions` methods return generator objects
gen = api.search_submissions(limit=100)
results = list(gen)

First 10 submissions to /r/politics in 2017, filtering results to url/author/title/subreddit fields.

The created_utc field will be added automatically (it’s used for paging).

list(api.search_submissions(after=int(dt.datetime(2017, 1, 1).timestamp()),
                        subreddit='politics',
                        filter=['url','author', 'title', 'subreddit'],
                        limit=10))

Trying a search argument that doesn’t actually work

According to the pushshift.io API documentation, we should be able to search submissions by url, but (at the time of this writing) this doesn’t actually work in practice. The API should still respect the limit argument and possibly other supported arguments, but no guarantees. If you find that an argument you have passed is not supported by the API, best thing is to just remove it from the query and modify your api call to only utilize supported arguments to mitigate risks from of unexpected behavior.

url = 'http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/mike-flynn-russia-ties-investigation-235272'
url_results = list(api.search_submissions(url=url, limit=500))

len(url_results), any(r.url == url for r in url_results)
# 500, False

All AskReddit comments containing the text “OP”

Use the q parameter to search text. Omitting the limit parameter does a full historical search. Requests are performed in batches of size specified by the max_results_per_request parameter (default=500). Omitting the “max_reponse_cache” test in the demo below will return all results. Otherwise, this demo will perform two API requests returning 500 comments each. Alternatively, the generator can be queried for additional results.

gen = api.search_comments(q='OP', subreddit='askreddit')

max_response_cache = 1000
cache = []

for c in gen:
    cache.append(c)

    # Omit this test to actually return all results. Wouldn't recommend it though: could take a while, but you do you.
    if len(cache) >= max_response_cache:
        break

# If you really want to: pick up where we left off to get the rest of the results.
if False:
    for c in gen:
        cache.append(c)

Using the aggs argument to count comments mentioning trump each hour in past week

Replicating the example from the pushshift documentation:

https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/comment/?q=trump&after=7d&aggs=created_utc&frequency=hour&size=0

I haven’t really experimented much with this functionality of the API, so I figured the simplest way to support it would be to just disable most of the bells and whistles provided by the API wrapper when the aggs argument is provided (i.e. paging, converting the result to a namedtuple for dot notation attribute access).

api = PushshiftAPI()
gen = api.search_comments(q='trump',
                          after='7d',
                          aggs='created_utc',
                          frequency='hour',
                          size=0,
                         )

result = next(gen)