How to mirror a reddit moderator page with python

Question

I'm trying to create a mirror of specific moderator pages (i.e. restricted) of a subreddit on my own server, for transparency purposes. Unfortunately my python-fu is weak and after struggling a bit with the reddit API, its python wrapper and even some answers in here, I'm no closer to having a working solution.

So what I need to do is login to reddit with a specific user, access a moderator only page and copy its html to a file on my own server for others to access

The problem I'm running into is that the API and its wrapper is not very well documented so I haven't found if there's a way to retrieve a reddit page after logging in. If I can do that, then I could theoretically copy the result to a simple html page on my server.

When trying to do it outside the python API, I can't figure out how to use the built-in modules of python to login and then read a restricted page.

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't use PRAW so I'm not sure about that, but if I were to do what you wanted to do, I'd do something like: login, save the modhash, grab the HTML from the url of the place you want to go:

It also looks like it's missing some CSS or something when I save it, but it's recognizable enough as it is. You'll need the requests module, along with pprint and json

import requests, json
from pprint import pprint as pp2

#----------------------------------------------------------------------
def login(username, password):
    """logs into reddit, saves cookie"""

    print 'begin log in'
    #username and password
    UP = {'user': username, 'passwd': password, 'api_type': 'json',}
    headers = {'user-agent': '/u/STACKOVERFLOW\'s API python bot', }

    #POST with user/pwd
    client = requests.session()
    r = client.post('http://www.reddit.com/api/login', data=UP)

    #if you want to see what you've got so far
    #print r.text
    #print r.cookies

    #gets and saves the modhash
    j = json.loads(r.text)
    client.modhash = j['json']['data']['modhash']
    print '{USER}\'s modhash is: {mh}'.format(USER=username, mh=client.modhash)

    #pp2(j)

    return client


client = login(USER, PASSWORD)

#mod mail url
url = r'http://www.reddit.com/r/mod/about/message/inbox/'
r = client.get(url)

#here's the HTML of the page
pp2(r.text)