Submission Stream Reply Bot

Most redditors have seen bots in action on the site. Reddit bots can perform a number of tasks including providing useful information, e.g., an Imperial to Metric units bot; convenience, e.g., a link corrector bot; or analytical information, e.g., redditor analyzer bot for writing complexity.

PRAW provides a simple way to build your own bot using the Python programming language. As a result, it is little surprise that a majority of bots on Reddit are powered by PRAW.

This tutorial will show you how to build a bot that monitors a particular subreddit, r/AskReddit, for new submissions containing simple questions and replies with an appropriate link to lmgtfy (Let Me Google That For You).

There are three key components we will address to perform this task:

  1. Monitor new submissions.

  2. Analyze the title of each submission to see if it contains a simple question.

  3. Reply with an appropriate lmgtfy link.

LMGTFY Bot

The goal of the LMGTFY Bot is to point users in the right direction when they ask a simple question that is unlikely to be upvoted or answered by other users.

Two examples of such questions are:

  1. “What is the capital of Canada?”

  2. “How many feet are in a yard?”

Once we identify these questions, the LMGTFY Bot will reply to the submission with an appropriate lmgtfy link. For the example questions those links are:

  1. https://lmgtfy.com/?q=What+is+the+capital+of+Canada%3F

  2. https://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+many+feet+are+in+a+yard%3F

Step 1: Getting Started

Access to Reddit’s API requires a set of OAuth2 credentials. Those credentials are obtained by registering an application with Reddit. To register an application and receive a set of OAuth2 credentials please follow only the “First Steps” section of Reddit’s OAuth2 Quick Start Example wiki page.

Once the credentials are obtained we can begin writing the LMGTFY Bot. Start by creating an instance of Reddit:

import praw

reddit = praw.Reddit(
    client_id="CLIENT_ID",
    client_secret="CLIENT_SECRET",
    password="PASSWORD",
    user_agent="LMGTFY (by u/USERNAME)",
    username="USERNAME",
)

In addition to the OAuth2 credentials, the username and password of the Reddit account that registered the application are required.

Note

This example demonstrates use of a script type application. For other application types please see Reddit’s wiki page OAuth2 App Types.

Step 2: Monitoring New Submissions to r/AskReddit

PRAW provides a convenient way to obtain new submissions to a given subreddit. To indefinitely iterate over new submissions to a subreddit add:

subreddit = reddit.subreddit("AskReddit")
for submission in subreddit.stream.submissions():
    # do something with submission
    ...

Replace "AskReddit" with the name of another subreddit if you want to iterate through its new submissions. Additionally, multiple subreddits can be specified by joining them with pluses (+), for example "AskReddit+NoStupidQuestions". All subreddits can be specified using the special name "all". Subreddits can be excluded from the special "all" subreddit by joining them with minuses (-), for example "all-excluded_subreddit1-excluded_subreddit2".

Step 3: Analyzing the Submission Titles

Now that we have a stream of new submissions to r/AskReddit, it is time to see if their titles contain a simple question. We naïvely define a simple question as:

  1. It must contain no more than ten words.

  2. It must contain one of the phrases "what is", "what are", or "who is".

Warning

These naïve criteria result in many false positives. It is strongly recommended that you develop more precise heuristics before launching a bot on any popular subreddits.

First we filter out titles that contain more than ten words:

if len(submission.title.split()) > 10:
    return

We then check to see if the submission’s title contains any of the desired phrases:

questions = ["what is", "who is", "what are"]
normalized_title = submission.title.lower()
for question_phrase in questions:
    if question_phrase in normalized_title:
        # do something with a matched submission
        break

String comparison in Python is case sensitive. As a result, we only compare a normalized version of the title to our lower-case question phrases. In this case, “normalized” means only lower-case.

The break at the end prevents us from matching more than once on a single submission. For instance, what would happen without the break if a submission’s title was “Who is or what are buffalo?”?

Step 4: Automatically Replying to the Submission

The LMGTFY Bot is nearly complete. We iterate through submissions and find ones that appear to be simple questions. All that is remaining is to reply to those submissions with an appropriate lmgtfy link.

First we will need to construct a working lmgtfy link. In essence, we want to pass the entire submission title to lmgtfy. However, there are certain characters that are not permitted in URLs or have other meanings. For instance, the space character, `` , is not permitted, and the question mark, ``?, has a special meaning. Thus we will transform those into their URL-safe representation so that a question like “What is the capital of Canada?” is transformed into the link https://lmgtfy.com/?q=What+is+the+capital+of+Canada%3F.

There are a number of ways we could accomplish this task. For starters, we could write a function to replace spaces with pluses (+) and question marks with %3F. However, there is even an easier way; using an existing built-in function to do so.

Add the following code where the “do something with a matched submission” comment is located:

from urllib.parse import quote_plus

reply_template = "[Let me google that for you](https://lmgtfy.com/?q={})"

url_title = quote_plus(submission.title)
reply_text = reply_template.format(url_title)

Now that we have the reply text, replying to the submission is easy:

submission.reply(reply_text)

If all went well, your comment should have been made. If your bot account is brand new, you will likely run into rate limit issues. These rate limits will persist until that account acquires sufficient karma.

Step 5: Cleaning Up The Code

While we have a working bot, we have added little segments here and there. If we were to continue to do so in this fashion our code would be quite unreadable. Let’s clean it up some.

The first thing we should do is put all of our import statements at the top of the file. It is common to list built-in packages before third-party ones:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from urllib.parse import quote_plus

Next, we extract a few constants that are used in our script:

QUESTIONS = ["what is", "who is", "what are"]

We then extract the segment of code pertaining to processing a single submission into its own function:

    subreddit = reddit.subreddit("AskReddit")
    for submission in subreddit.stream.submissions():
        process_submission(submission)


def process_submission(submission):
    # Ignore titles with more than 10 words as they probably are not simple questions.
    if len(submission.title.split()) > 10:
        return

    normalized_title = submission.title.lower()
    for question_phrase in QUESTIONS:
        if question_phrase in normalized_title:
            url_title = quote_plus(submission.title)
            reply_text = REPLY_TEMPLATE.format(url_title)

Observe that we added some comments and a print() call. The print() addition informs us every time we are about to reply to a submission, which is useful to ensure the script is running.

Next, it is a good practice to not have any top-level executable code in case you want to turn your Python script into a Python module, i.e., import it from another Python script or module. A common way to do that is to move the top-level code to a main function:

def main():
    reddit = praw.Reddit(
        client_id="CLIENT_ID",
        client_secret="CLIENT_SECRET",
        password="PASSWORD",
        user_agent="LMGTFY (by u/USERNAME)",
        username="USERNAME",

Finally, we need to call main only in the cases that this script is the one being executed:

            # A reply has been made so do not attempt to match other phrases.
            break


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The Complete LMGTFY Bot

The following is the complete LMGTFY Bot:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from urllib.parse import quote_plus

import praw

QUESTIONS = ["what is", "who is", "what are"]
REPLY_TEMPLATE = "[Let me google that for you](https://lmgtfy.com/?q={})"


def main():
    reddit = praw.Reddit(
        client_id="CLIENT_ID",
        client_secret="CLIENT_SECRET",
        password="PASSWORD",
        user_agent="LMGTFY (by u/USERNAME)",
        username="USERNAME",
    )

    subreddit = reddit.subreddit("AskReddit")
    for submission in subreddit.stream.submissions():
        process_submission(submission)


def process_submission(submission):
    # Ignore titles with more than 10 words as they probably are not simple questions.
    if len(submission.title.split()) > 10:
        return

    normalized_title = submission.title.lower()
    for question_phrase in QUESTIONS:
        if question_phrase in normalized_title:
            url_title = quote_plus(submission.title)
            reply_text = REPLY_TEMPLATE.format(url_title)
            print(f"Replying to: {submission.title}")
            submission.reply(body=reply_text)
            # A reply has been made so do not attempt to match other phrases.
            break


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()