Reddit Trending Topics

Creating a trending topics application that displays a wordcloud of the most frequent words in the comment sections of a given subreddit, using Reddit's API.

Follow the steps to run the code on your own:

1. Setting up a Python Virtual Environment (venv):

In your project's directory, run the following commands:

Installing:

• Windows:

python -m venv myenv

• Linux/Mac:

python3 -m venv myenv

Activating:

(make sure to activate venv in your terminal to install dependencies)

• Windows:

myenv/Scripts/Activate

• Linux/Mac:

source myenv/bin/activate

Deactivating:

• Windows/Linux/Mac

deactivate

2. Installing Required Dependencies:

• Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW):

pip install praw

• Python wordcloud:

pip install wordcloud

• Python dotenv:

pip install python-dotenv

• Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK):

pip install nltk

To install NLTK data, create a python terminal typing python/python3 command and run:

import nltk
nltk.download('stopwords')

3. Setting up Reddit's API Registration:

To setup your API registration, follow the instructions in this TUTORIAL.

4. Securing API keys with '.env' file:

create a file named '.env' and replace the values of your API keys in the environment variables. Here's an example:

Windows Format:

REDDIT_CLIENT_ID=RedDitCliEntID0123456789
REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET=clIeNTseCret0123456789
REDDIT_USER_AGENT=subreddit trending topics by u/your_reddits_username

Linux/Mac Format:

export REDDIT_CLIENT_ID="RedDitCliEntID0123456789"
export REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET="clIeNTseCret0123456789"
export REDDIT_USER_AGENT="subreddit trending topics by u/your_reddits_username"

Results:

This wordcloud is an output example of the most commented words in the 'python' subreddit in May 2024, between 05-01 and 05-24

These are the top 15 most commented words, each one associated with it's frequency:

1. 's': 576
2. 'python': 545
3. 'n': 535
4. 't': 533
5. 'use': 470
6. 'like': 396
7. 'code': 367
8. 'https': 362
9. 'would': 307
10. 'using': 239
11. 'com': 222
12. 'need': 212
13. 'also': 211
14. 'one': 209
15. 'm': 187