fricker12 / pyktok

A simple module to collect video, text, and metadata from Tiktok.

Pyktok

A simple module to collect video, text, and metadata from Tiktok with no authentication required.

By @dfreelon, @pkreissel, and @p-bach

We developed Pyktok ("pick-tock") because none of the existing TikTok data collection utilities we could find suited our needs. Pyktok pulls its data directly from the JSON object embedded in every Tiktok video and user page (except for save_video_comments and save_hashtag_video_urls, which use a hidden TikTok API which is not publicly documented). Here are its major features, most of which require the URL(s) of the content you wish to collect:

• Download TikTok videos
• Download video metadata
• Download all available video comments (thanks @pkreissel)
• Download up to 30 most recent user video URLs
• Download full TikTok JSON data objects (in case you want to extract data from parts of the object not included in the above functions)
• Download TikTok video URLs from hashtag pages (thanks @p-bach)

This program may stop working suddenly if TikTok changes how it stores its data (see Freelon, 2018).

R users, check out traktok, an R port of Pyktok.

Installation

pip install pyktok

Requirements

Pyktok relies on the following packages:

• BeautifulSoup
• browser_cookie3
• Numpy
• Pandas
• Requests

Usage

import pyktok as pyk

To download a single TikTok video and one line of metadata to the file "video_data.csv":

pyk.save_tiktok('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7106594312292453675?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1',
	        True,
                'video_data.csv')

To download another TikTok video and add its metadata to the same file as above:

pyk.save_tiktok('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1',
	        True,
                'video_data.csv')

To get a list of URLs of up to 30 of a user's most recent videos:

tiktok_videos = pyk.get_account_video_urls('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok')

To download metadata and comment data ONLY from video URLs collected via the preceding line of code (to also download the videos, change False to True). If TikTok autobans the scraper, try changing the 1 to a higher number to increase the number of seconds between executions.

pyk.save_tiktok_multi(tiktok_videos,
                      False,
                      'tiktok_data.csv',
                      1)

To get an individual video's JSON object:

tt_json = pyk.get_tiktok_json('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1')

To download all available video comments (this is the default behavior, but you can change the max_comments parameter if desired)

pyk.save_video_comments('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1')

To download video comments starting with comment #3865 (if your previous download session was interrupted; you can get the last comment number from the console output):

pyk.save_video_comments('https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7011536772089924869?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1',
			cursor_resume=3865)

To download video URLs for the hashtag "#funny" (practically speaking, you may not get every available URL). Also, this function tends to pull many duplicate URLs, so we highly recommend deduplication prior to any further analysis.

pyk.save_hashtag_video_urls('funny')

TikTok's servers may not love it if you run save_tiktok_multi, save_video_comments, or save_hashtag_video_urls at full speed, so I recommend increasing the sleep parameter if you get autobanned. I haven't tested this extensively so I have no idea if or when autobans start to kick in.