quora-scraper 1.0.3

Python based code to scrap and download data from quora website: questions related to certain topics, answers given on certain questions and users profile data

Quora-scraper

Quora-scraper simulates a browser environment to let you scrape Quora rich textual data. You can use one of the three scraping modules to: Find questions that discuss about certain topics (such as Finance, Politics, Tesla or Donald-Trump). Scrape Quora answers related to certain question(s), or scrape users profile.

Install

To use our scraper, please follow the steps below:

• install the latest version of google-chrome.
• install python 3.6 or upper versions.
• install quora-scraper:

$ pip install quora-scraper

To update quora-scraper:

$ pip install quora-scraper --upgrade

Usage

quora-scraper has three scraping modules : questions ,answers,users.

1) Scraping questions URL:

You can scrape questions related to certain topics using questions command. This module takes as an input a list of topic keywords. Output is a questions_URL file for each topic saved under QuestionsURLs/ directory. Scraping a topic questions can be done as follows:

• a) Use "-k" parameter + topic keywords list.

  $ quora-scraper questions -k [finance,politics,Donald-Trump]
  

• b) Use "-f" parameter + topic keywords file location. (keywords must be line separated inside the file):

  $ quora-scraper questions -f  topics_file.txt
  

2) Scraping answers:

Quora answers are scraped using answers command. This module takes as an input a list of Questions URL. Output is a file of scraped answers (answers.txt). Each answer consists of : Quest-ID | AnswerDate | AnswerAuthor-ID | Quest-tags | Answer-Text Scraping answers can be done as follows:

• a) Use "-k" parameter + question URLs list.

  $ quora-scraper answers -k [https://www.quora.com/Is-milk-good,https://www.quora.com/Was-Einstein-a-fake-and-a-plagiarist]
  

• b) Use "-f" parameter + question URLs file location:

  $ quora-scraper answers -f  questions_url.txt
  

3) Scraping Quora user profile:

You can scrap Quora Users profile using users command. This module takes as an input a list of Quora user IDs. Output is UserProfile file for eah UserID saved under the Qusers/ directory, Users data consists of : First line : UserID | ProfileDescription |ProfileBio | Location | TotalViews |NBAnswers | NBQuestions | NBFollowers | NBFollowing Remaining lines (User's answers): AnswerDate | QuestionID | AnswerText Scraping Users profile can be done as follows:

• a) Use "-k" parameter + User-IDs list.

  $ quora-scraper users -k [Albert-Einstein-195,Jackie-Chan-8]
  

• b) Use "-f" parameter + User-IDs file.

  $ quora-scraper users -f Quora_users_ids.txt
  

Note

a) Please note that all input files have tab separated fields.

b) You can add a list/line index parameter In order to start the scraping from that index. The code below will start scraping from "physics" keyword: sh $ quora-scraper questions -k [finance,politics,tech,physics,life,sports] 3

c) Quora-scraper is a command-line application written in Python that scrapes Quora data. It uses xpaths method to scrap Quora webpage elements. Since Quora HTML Structure is constantly changing, the code may need modification from time to time. Please feel free to update and contribute to the source-code in order to keep the scraper up-to-date.

License

This project uses the following license: MIT