quick script for a friend to write out a reddit thread

download.py

# do a "pip install praw" on the command line
import sys
import praw
import textwrap


def print_thread(comment, indent=0):
    """
    write out this comment, and then check if there are replies
    and if there are replies, we call this recursively, adding another
    indent for each level
    """
    if isinstance(comment, praw.objects.MoreComments):
        return

    # one space * number of indents, add a -
    indents = (' ' * indent * 2)
    wrapper = textwrap.TextWrapper(width=100,
                                   initial_indent=indents + '- ',
                                   subsequent_indent=indents + '  ')
    for line in wrapper.wrap(comment.body):
        print(line)

    # check if there are replies. yay, recursion!
    for sub_comment in comment.replies:
        print_thread(sub_comment, indent + 1)


def main():
    r = praw.Reddit('Comment Scraper 1.0 by u/_Daimon_ see '
                    'https://praw.readthedocs.org/en/latest/'
                    'pages/comment_parsing.html')

    # get from the command line the thread ID. otherwise,
    # just do some default thread id for giggles
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        sub_id = sys.argv[1]
    else:
        sub_id ='4qwvvw'

    # read the submission
    submission = r.get_submission(submission_id=sub_id)

    # write out the title and body
    print(submission.title)
    print('----')
    print(submission.selftext)
    print('------------------------------')

    # write out all the comments. win!
    comments = praw.helpers.flatten_tree(submission.comments)
    for comment in comments:
        if isinstance(comment, praw.objects.MoreComments):
            continue

        print('------------------')
        print_thread(comment)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()