8.6.3. Demo: Sentiment Analysis on Reddit

Now let’s try using sentiment analysis (and loop variables) on Reddit:

We’ll start by doing our normal steps to load Reddit PRAW (or fake praw)

Reddit PRAW Setup

import praw

(optional) make a fake praw connection with the fake_praw library

For testing purposes, we’ve added this line of code, which loads a fake version of praw, so it wont actually connect to reddit. If you want to try to actually connect to reddit, don’t run this line of code.

%run ../../fake_apis/fake_praw.ipynb

Fake praw is replacing the praw library. Fake praw doesn't need real passwords, and prevents you from accessing real reddit

# Load all your developer access passwords into Python
# TODO: Put your reddit username, password, and special developer access passwords below:
username="fake_reddit_username"
password="sa@#4*fdf_fake_password_$%DSG#%DG"
client_id="45adf$TW_fake_client_id_JESdsg1O"
client_secret="56sd_fake_client_secret_%Yh%"

# Give the praw code your reddit account info so
# it can perform reddit actions
reddit = praw.Reddit(
    username=username, password=password,
    client_id=client_id, client_secret=client_secret,
    user_agent="a custom python script"
)

Fake praw is pretending to collect account info to use on reddit

Sentiment Analysis

load sentiment analysis library and make analyzer

import nltk
nltk.download(["vader_lexicon"])
from nltk.sentiment import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer
sia = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()

[nltk_data] Downloading package vader_lexicon to
[nltk_data]     C:\Users\kmthayer\AppData\Roaming\nltk_data...
[nltk_data]   Package vader_lexicon is already up-to-date!

loop through submissions, finding average sentiment

We can now combine our previous examples of looping through reddit submissions with what we just learned of sentiment analysis and looping variables to find the average sentiment of a set of submission titles.

num_submissions = 0
total_sentiment = 0

# Look up the subreddit "cuteanimals", then find the "hot" list, getting up to 10 submission
submissions = reddit.subreddit("cuteanimals").hot(limit=10)

# Turn the submission results into a Python List
submissions_list = list(submissions)

for submission in submissions_list:
    #calculate sentiment
    submission_sentiment = sia.polarity_scores(submission.title)["compound"]
    num_submissions += 1
    total_sentiment += submission_sentiment

    print("Sentiment: " + str(submission_sentiment))
    print("   Submission Title: " + submission.title)
    print()



average_sentiment = total_sentiment / num_submissions
print("Average sentiment was " + str(average_sentiment))

Fake praw is pretending to select the subreddit: cuteanimals

Sentiment: 0.5093
   Submission Title: Look at my cute dog!

Sentiment: 0.0
   Submission Title: A baby lizard!

Sentiment: 0.6239
   Submission Title: The cutest bird ever!

Average sentiment was 0.3777333333333333

We can now see the average sentiment of a set of reddit post titles based on our search of a subreddit!

If you use your reddit bot keys, you can change the subreddit to be whatever one you want and see whether people are posting positively or negatively in it.

note: You can change limit=10 to go up higher to get more submissions at a time to find the average of