Using Vk-App-Scraping

This document explains how to use the VkApp application for extracting comments from VK (VKontakte) posts.

Prerequisites

• Python installed on your system.
• Chrome web browser.
• Chromedriver installed and added to your system's PATH.

Install requirements

Make sure to use virtualenv

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To use VkApp, follow these steps:

1. Ensure you have a CSV file containing VK post URLs. Each URL should be in a separate row under the column named 'urls'.

2. Modify the urls.csv file according to your VK post URLs.

3. Run the main.py script:

   python main.py

4. The script will iterate through the URLs in the urls.csv file, extract comments from each post, and save them to a CSV file named dataset.csv by default.

5. Optionally, you can specify input and output CSV filenames using the file_input and file_output parameters in the run_get_csv function.

Example

# main.py
import csv
from app import VkApp

def run_get_csv(file_input: str | None = None, file_output: str | None = None):
 try:
     with open(file_input, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
         reader = csv.DictReader(file)
         for row in reader:
             if 'urls' in row:
                 VkApp().get(url=row['urls'],
                             csv=True, filename=file_output)
                 print(f"Done: {row['urls']}")
 except FileNotFoundError:
     print("File not found.")

if __name__ == "__main__":
 run_get_csv("urls.csv", "dataset.csv")

Using VkApp as a Class

You can utilize VkApp as a class within your Python projects. Here's a brief explanation of how to use it:

1. Instantiate VkApp: First, create an instance of the VkApp class.

2. Call the get method: Use the get method of VkApp to extract comments from VK posts. Pass the URL of the VK post as an argument to this method.

3. Optional Parameters: You can specify optional parameters such as csv (to save comments to a CSV file) and filename (to specify the output filename). In this case, if you set csv to False, the comments will not be saved to a CSV file.

4. Usage Example: Here's a simple example of how to use VkApp without saving to a CSV file:

   from app import VkApp
   
   # Instantiate VkApp
   vk_app = VkApp()
   
   # Extract comments from a VK post without saving to a CSV file
   comments = vk_app.get(url="https://vk.com/wall-id")

5. Processing Comments: The get method returns a list of comments extracted from the VK post. You can then process these comments as needed within your application.

6. Error Handling: VkApp includes basic error handling to ensure that the provided URL is valid and that the necessary dependencies are installed.

By incorporating VkApp into your Python projects, you can easily extract comments from VK posts and integrate this functionality into your applications without saving to a CSV file.

Additional Notes

• The default behavior is to return comments without saving to a CSV file. If you want to save comments to a CSV file, you can specify the csv=True parameter along with the filename parameter to set the output filename.
• Ensure that Chromedriver is compatible with your Chrome browser version.