ohhdemgirls/strigil

Strigil is a gem for easily scraping a Reddit user's comment history into a JSON file

Strigil

Strigil is a gem for easily scraping a Reddit user's comment history into a JSON file

Strigil is an OSINT tool that makes it easy to scrape a Reddit user's comment history into a JSON file. With the official Reddit API, it's only possible to go back to the previous 100 comments by a user. Using Selenium, Strigil is able to go back about 1,000 comments. It results in a comments.json file that you can then manipulate as you wish. For example, you could run analysis on the data to build charts of posting frequency, heatmaps for what subreddits a user comments in, and other such things.

The comments.json file is presented as an array of JSON objects. The JSON objects are formatted in the following way:

{
  "author": "exampleuser"
  "subreddit": "examplesub"
  "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/examplesub/comments/8830oa/example_post/dwhg6vi/"
  "timestamp": "2017-8-19 18:15:43 -0400"
  "text": "Yes, mods, I expect another ban."
}

Installation

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Strigil is incredibly easy to set up and use. You just need to install the gem strigil and run two commands. You can even do it directly in the irb shell. You simply need to require the gem and run Strigil.engage('username'), filling in username with the target user.

1. $ gem install strigil
2. $ irb
3. > require 'strigil'
4. > Strigil.engage('username')

It may take a moment, but a data/comments.json file will be created in your current directory.

Contribute

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Feel free to contribute to the project by forking and issuing a pull request.

Support

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Simply open an issue ticket to report any problems or bugs.

License

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This project is licensed under the MIT license.