Fetch and parse Disqus comments

parse_disqus_json.rb

# I was struggling to get an export of my Disqus comments because their export feature never provided any results.
# I discovered https://blog.jasonantman.com/2014/03/python-script-to-backup-disqus-comments/ (https://github.com/jantman/misc-scripts/blob/master/disqus_backup.py)
# which is a Python script to download your Disqus comments.
# This script didn't work for me on python3 but I installed python2 and it worked fine.
#
# Afterwards I had a JSON dump of my comments. I wrote the below script to parse these JSON comments into a CSV
# with a thread_link and comment column.
# It's not a perfect export format (that's what the JSON is for) but it's good enough for me to read the comments.
#
# Run with: `ruby parse_disqus_json.rb dump.json export.csv`
# Confirmed working on Ruby 3.0.6.

require 'json'
require 'csv'

in_path = ARGV[0]
json = JSON.parse(File.read(in_path))

out_path = ARGV[1]

comments = json["posts"]
threads = json["threads"]
comments_by_thread = comments.group_by { |c| c["thread"] }

CSV.open(out_path, "wb") do |csv|
  csv << ["thread_link", "comment"]

  comments_by_thread.each do |(thread_id, comments)|
    thread = threads.find { |thread| thread["id"] == thread_id }
    link = thread["link"]

    comments.each do |comment|
      csv << [link, comment["raw_message"]]
    end
  end
end