Reddit Roleplay Assembler
This tool takes a reddit thread, finds the longest chain of comments, and then flattens that chain into something that's easy to read.
Any comments that aren't directly a part of the longest chain are discarded.
Why?
Reddit will only show comments down a depth of 10 before forcing you to click to load the next 10 comments. For most threads, this isn't much of an issue, but for threads with lots of back-and-forth, which is especially common in role-playing, the chain of comments can easily reach into the thousands and reloading after reading each 10 can get tiring.
Also, this gives an easy way to save a thread for offline reading.
Render formats
Reddit Roleplay Assembler (RRA) can currently export the flattened comments to html, plaintext or JSON formats
In JSON format, the decoded data is a flat array of dictionaries, where each dictionary represents a single comment and the comments are ordered chronologically in the array. Each comment looks like this (for example):
{
"author": "wallacoloo",
"body_html": "Have you seen the <a href='https://github.com/Wallacoloo/reddit-roleplay-assembler'>Reddit Roleplay Assembler</a>?",
"created_utc": 1437126303.0,
"permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/..."
}In plaintext, all the text is extracted from the body of each comment and the comments are rendered like:
<author>: body
and with a blank line between each comment (the above angle brackets are included in the plaintext). When it comes to links, the URL is stripped but the link description is preserved.
In html mode, images, etc. are preserved and the subreddit's stylesheet is packaged with the rendered file. Any images specific to the subreddit are also packaged with the rendered file. So as long as the comments only make use of subreddit-specific images (e.g. emoticons), the rendered file will still work in offline mode.
Usage
This script is designed to be run from a terminal as so:
mane.py --thread xxxxxx [--json] [--txt] [--html] [--author author_name,character_name [...]] [--character-color character_name,css-color [...]]
xxxxxx is the id of the thread you wish to flatten, and --json and --txt are flags to
specify the desired output format. Output will be placed in a file of the same name as the thread id,
but with a ".json", ".txt" or "html" extension.
The --author (or -a) flags allow you to map authors to their character role. You can repeat the flag for as many authors as needed.
The --character-color flag maps a character to some unique color. This is just used to set the background of a comment such that you can see who's speaking/acting. The color is any valid CSS color, e.g. "#abcdef" or "white".
For example, if you wanted a flattened html version of the ridiculously long exchange between Lunas_Disciple and Dr_Zorand
in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/339wbs/lets_raise_the_stakes_shall_we_by_inkygarden/cqivxk1,
you would take the thread id from that url, 339wbs and run mane.py --thread 339wbs --json --html -a Lunas_Disciple,Twily -a Dr_Zorand,Dashie --character-color Twily,#e6ccf0 --character-color Dashie,#cbeafb. This assigns Lunas_Disciple as the speaking role for Twily and Dr_Zorand as the role for Dashie, configures the colors of each character, fetches the thread and caches it as json, and generates an html page. You can then view the output by opening 339wbs.html.
If a file of the name "xxxxxx.json" already exists, this will be used as a cache when rendering other formats.
Therefore, it is recommended to always pass the --json flag when loading a thread for the first time,
as it can easily take upwards of an hour to download the thread if it contains 10000 comments
(since reddit only lets one request 10 comments at a time, it becomes 1000 individual requests).