Copyright 2013 Randal S. Olson.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
You must first install PRAW and any of its dependencies before you can use this script. This script uses PRAW to scrape posts from Reddit.
Also note that this script currently only works on *nix machines. Windows users may use cygwin or similar *nix emulators.
Also depends on 'words' package on linux systems.
word_freqs.py scrapes a specific subreddit or Redditor and prints out all of the commonly-used words for the past month.
common-words.csv is a data file containing a list of words that should be considered common. Note that this list is not final and is constantly changing.
data_dumps/*.csv are all of the word dumps we've added to the repo. Usually we only add the data dumps by request.
First make sure that word_freqs.py and common-words.csv are in the same directory. Next, enter:
python word_freqs.py -h
This command will detail all of the command line options and arguments for the script.
To count the most-used words for a subreddit, enter the following command:
python word_freqs.py YOUR-USERNAME /r/SUBREDDIT MAX_SUBS
Similarly, for a Reddit user:
python word_freqs.py YOUR-USERNAME /u/REDDITOR MAX_SUBS
where YOUR-USERNAME is your Reddit username and SUBREDDIT / REDDITOR is the subreddit / Redditor you want to make the word cloud for, and MAX_SUBS should be 0 for scraping all submissions, otherwise specify the number. You must provide all three arguments for the script to work properly.
Once the script completes, it will create a file called SUBREDDIT.csv to the directory you ran it in. This file contains all of the commonly-used words from the subreddit / Redditor you specified in the frequencies they were used.
To make a word cloud out of the words, copy all of the words into http://www.wordle.net/create and click the Go button. Ta-da, you're done!