pyktok 0.0.12

A package for collecting TikTok videos and metadata.

Pyktok

A simple module to collect video, text, and metadata from TikTok.

By @dfreelon with contributions from @pkreissel, @p-bach, and @TimoBaeuerle

We developed Pyktok ("pick-tock") because none of the existing TikTok data collection utilities we could find suited our needs. Pyktok pulls its data directly from the JSON objects embedded in Tiktok pages as well as from hidden APIs with no public documentation. Here are its major features, most of which require the URL(s) of the content you wish to collect:

• Download TikTok videos
• Download video metadata
• Download up to 20 video comments
• Download 15-20 videos and/or metadata lines from hashtag, user, and music pages displaying multiple videos
• Download full TikTok JSON data objects (in case you want to extract data from parts of the object not included in the above functions)
• Download TikTok metadata and video from search pages (thanks @p-bach and @TimoBaeuerle)

This program may stop working suddenly if TikTok changes how it stores its data (see Freelon, 2018). Some functions may require you to be logged in to TikTok.

R users, check out traktok, an R port of Pyktok.

Installation

pip install pyktok (still a version behind but will fix soon)

Requirements

Pyktok relies on the following packages:

• BeautifulSoup
• browser_cookie3
• Numpy
• Pandas
• Requests
• Selenium
• webdriver-manager

Usage

import pyktok as pyk

To download a single TikTok video and one line of metadata to the file "video_data.csv":

pyk.save_tiktok('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7106594312292453675?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1',
	        True,
                'video_data.csv')

To download another TikTok video and add its metadata to the same file as above:

pyk.save_tiktok('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1',
	        True,
                'video_data.csv')

To download metadata ONLY from the video URLs used in the preceding two lines of code (to also download the videos, change False to True). If TikTok autobans the scraper, try changing the 1 to a higher number to increase the number of seconds between executions.

tiktok_videos = ['https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7106594312292453675?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1',
                 'https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1']
pyk.save_tiktok_multi_urls(tiktok_videos,
                           False,
                     	  'tiktok_data.csv',
                     	   1)

To download up to 30 metadata lines from a user page (note, for this to work you must set the browser_name parameter to a browser on your system that you have used to access TikTok and that is supported by browser_cookie3. I think the only valid values are 'chrome' and 'firefox'. Also you can get the videos too by setting save_video to True):

pyk.save_tiktok_multi_page('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok',save_video=False,save_metadata=True,browser_name='chrome')

To download up to 15 metadata lines from a hashtag page:

pyk.save_tiktok_multi_page('https://www.tiktok.com/tag/datascience?lang=en',save_video=False,save_metadata=True)

To download up to 15 metadata lines from a music page:

pyk.save_tiktok_multi_page('https://www.tiktok.com/music/Anti-Hero-7156822419213125634?lang=en',save_video=False,save_metadata=True)

To get an individual video's JSON object:

tt_json = pyk.get_tiktok_json('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1')

To download all video comments initially visible on the page (previous versions of this function used TT's hidden API to capture many thousands of comments, but TT has disabled this feature, so the current function uses browser automation--which is unfortunately very slow--to pull only the comments that initially appear. However, you could use this function to download comments from videos periodically, which should give you a larger number of comments)

pyk.save_visible_comments('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1')

To download metadata for the keyword "funny" (practically speaking, you may not get all available data). This function has been rewritten since TT's data structure change, but should work. You can also download videos at the same time by setting save_videos to True.

pyk.save_tiktok_by_keyword('funny')

TikTok's servers may not love it if you run some of the above functions at full speed, so I recommend increasing the sleep parameter if you get autobanned. I haven't tested this extensively so I have no idea if or when autobans start to kick in.