August 2025: Consuming Reddit, Using py.space
Reddit is an enormous source of plain text useful for anything from topical research to statistical infestigation to ML training. Its data is accessible through an API, and Python’s praw library can access that API. However, it takes some detective work to get going with the Reddit API and undersand the output, so we’ll try to do that work for you. That should also be useful if you want to use another language’s Reddit API library, like redditjs, php-reddit-api, the reddit-api gem, or Reddit::Client.
But wait, how to share this project and let others use it? One option is py.space, a free service offered by Anvil. We’ll take it for a spin, both to help you try praw and to get familiar with it for your own projects.
Location: Innovation Hub
We meet in the Innovation Hub,
a gorgeous new facility that’s part of the renovated Dayton Arcade complex.
Enter through the doors that face the Wright Stop Plaza bus hub.
Street parking is free in the evening. I usually park on Ludlow Street.
or
if for any reason coming downtown doesn’t work for you (for instance, you’ve been exposed to COVID, or you’ve converted yourself to purely digital format and now exist as a set of cloud-hosted algorithms), we’ll be online as well!
Join us at 7 PM EDT on the PyFri Discord channel, discord.gg/9SgTh3T, and click on the General voice chat link. You may need to install the Discord desktop app rather than just using the web interface.