Py-StackExchange: An API wrapper for Python

Question

UPDATE: 2.x support is now mainline! Please read the wiki page for important information about the update.

A warm welcome to you, traveller. You have arrived at the home of Py-StackExchange, the library definitively proven^† to be the best library for using the SE API from Python. If you are still interested (and by golly, you should be) after glancing at the masterpiece below, please check the wiki on Github.

† Ahem.

About

So, what is Py-StackExchange? Well, I'm glad you asked.

It is a Python library for querying the StackExchange API from your Python applications. Integration, ahoy!

So why should you use it? After all, the SE API is sooo simple that you might think it'd be quicker to just write your own, and that it'd be faster and you wouldn't have to look at all that documentation and do all that thinking... well:

Let's start with the API coverage - what can the API do? And, more importantly, what can the library do?

• Access any StackExchange site, with just its URL! Even those that aren't online yet!
• If you just can't decide which one to use, you can use StackAuth to look up the full list of sites.
• Once you're online, you can view everything about users, questions, answers, badges, comments and tags.
• You can even go back in time by playing with post revisions.
• Stalk Generate a detailed profile of a user's life Help users by looking up every StackExchange account they have. Every single one.
• And, on any of those sites, peruse a detailed history of everything they've ever done - every edit, every comment, every time they were awarded a badge... Watch StackOverflow become the new Facebook overnight with the timeline feature.
• See how well an SE site is doing; obsessively check its site statistics.
• Search the questions of StackExchange sites.

So, why not write your own classes to consume said pure, concentrated brilliance?

• Let someone else deal with all that laborious HTTP request business... you know you want to...
• All the little idiosyncratic potholes on your road to API happiness have been filled in for you. We have little elves which jump into your code and parse your JSON and your dates and your lists until every response is itself a little baby python.
• URLs change 99.9% more often than the interface of this module. Fact.
• It's faster than Michael Palin on a broken bicycle. It also knows about request throttling, so when it gets too fast for its own good, it applies the brakes just enough to restore order.
• It loads lazily information that would take another request to fetch, meaning you never use more of your limit than you need to.
• It caches requests automatically, so you need to care slightly less about writing efficient code! (new in 1.1)

Now, onto the religious advantages:

• Documentation? Bah, we have naming conventions. (This feature was inspired by Rails.)
  Pssst - don't tell anyone, but there is documentation too, if that's your style. (README/Wiki)
• Naming conventions? Who needs them? We have an interactive program that writes your code for you while you look around the StackExchange site of your choice. (This feature was inspired by Jon Skeet.)
• Almost-sentient, artificially intelligent programming programs? Ugh, how 20^th century. There are metric heaps of example code available in the source repo, a small excerpt of which is presented below for your viewing pleasure.

Please note: This is not an official product of Stack Overflow Internet Services, Inc.

Code Snippet

The wiki has details of all the example code in the code repository. In fact, here's a small taster from the Narcissism demo.

#!/usr/bin/env python

# a hack so you can run it 'python demo/stats.py'
import sys
from stackauth import StackAuth
from stackexchange import Site, StackOverflow

user_id = 41981 if len(sys.argv) < 2 else int(sys.argv[1])
print 'StackOverflow user %d\'s accounts:' % user_id

stack_auth = StackAuth()
so = Site(StackOverflow)
accounts = stack_auth.associated(so, user_id)
reputation = {}

for account in accounts:
    print '  %s: %s / %d reputation' % (account.display_name, account.on_site.name, account.reputation)

    reputation[account.reputation] = account.on_site.name

print 'Most reputation on: %s' % reputation[max(reputation)]

Or how about a scrolling list of questions?

import stackexchange
so = stackexchange.StackOverflow()

for q in so.questions(pagesize=50):
    print q.title

About

This is a Python library/wrapper around the StackExchange and StackAuth APIs. It provides a clean, object-oriented API for accessing the various sites.

License

The script is licensed under the Simplified BSD license. You can find the full text of the license here, but the gist of it is that:

• You need to give attribution when you distribute (compiled or in source form) the library - not your application unless you include the library files `in the box'.
• The standard "NO WARRANTY" (in caps!) is provided.

Other than that you can more or less do what you like!

Download

In the bad old days (i.e. about 2 hours before I wrote this), you had to manually install Py-StackExchange after cloning the Git repository.

You can still do this: http://github.com/lucjon/Py-StackExchange. You can also download a ZIP or TGZ file from there.

However, there is a new and improved way to get Py-StackExchange: you can install it straight from the PyPI! Just type:

~$ easy_install py-stackexchange

Also, distutils gives me fantastical benefits on the side, such as a completely original Windows installer with an all-new design. You can also find a stable source distribution on the downloads page @ Github.

Platform

The library is written in standard Python 2.6, with, as far as I am aware, no specific platform dependency. As long as your Python install has the full standard library available, it should work fine.

Python 2.6 is required for the json module. (EDIT: @ADB in the comments has noted that the SimpleJson library can be used instead. This means it works on Python 2.5 and also on the Google App Engine.)

Python 3.x is also supported.

Contact

The library is being written by Lucas Jones (lucasjones.co.uk / SO). If you want to contact me, send me some mail at lucas @ lucasjones.co.uk.

Answer 1

You can get around the json/simplejson easily in your wrapper. Just change your import line from

import urllib2, json, httplib, datetime, operator

to

import urllib2, httplib, datetime, operator
try:
    import json
except ImportError:
    import simplejson as json

That way you can just use json in the rest of your code, but client pythons will load whichever library is available on that system.

Keep up the good work, I'll probably be using your library assuming I can dream up something cool to do with it.

Answer 2

I am using Py-StackExchange in our Stack2Blog application.

How do I retrieve a list of answers of a specific user using this wrapper?

After retrieving a user object, the .answers member variable returns an empty list while I know the user does have posts.

Answer 3

Edit:

My problem below has been "solved", and it's a problem with the fact that I'm getting back gzip-compressed data from stackapps. See the SO Answer. I'm still unsure why this happens only on my computer (possible reason: routers in my network adding content-headers), but I'm guessing this should be fixed in the wrapper itself.

Come to think of it, the wrapper should probably be requesting gzip-compress data in the first place, to save download time.

Original question

I'm having problems using the library. I'm doing the following:

site = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow)
user = site.user(userid)

And I'm getting the following exception:

ValueError at /answers
No JSON object could be decoded

After some debugging, I see that the line which throws the error is: dump = json.load(conn) (around line 410). When I try printing the urllib object I get back (conn), I get the following:

\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\xed\xbd\x07`\x1cI\x96%&/m\xca{\x7fJ\xf5J\xd7\xe0t\xa1\x08\x80`\x ...

I don't have any experience with urllib, so I'm not sure if that's a good output, although it doesn't look right to me (by contrast, opening http://www.google.com gives back actual meaningful text).

Any ideas as to what the problem could be?

Edit: Just running the code snippet in your question in IDLE is causing a problem.

Answer 4

Total results vary with page size

The idea of producing a transparent iterator (getting the next page as needed) is cool, but it just isn't working; the page size affects the total number of results returned (apparently to a multiple of the page size)...:-(

My code needs to look at all Qs asked for a given tag in a given month:

def qstats(site, tag, month, year=None):
    fromdate, todate = month_range(month, year)

    qs = site.questions(pagesize=100,
        sort='votes',
        fromdate=ts(*fromdate),
        todate=ts(*todate),
        tagged=tag)

    good_qs = 0
    for i, q in enumerate(qs, start=1):
        good, answered = qtype(q)
        if good:
            good_qs += 1
    return i, good_qs

With a page size of 100, as here, I see, from a loop calling this for different months on a certain tag:

2014/11: 242 good Qs out of 600 (40%)
2014/12: 242 good Qs out of 500 (48%)
2015/1: 235 good Qs out of 500 (47%)

but e.g with an arbitrary page size of 37, it's instead

2014/11: 179 good Qs out of 518 (35%)
2014/12: 179 good Qs out of 518 (35%)
2015/1: 172 good Qs out of 518 (33%)

(518 is 37 * 14, whence my hypothesis that the returned number of items is somehow constrained to be a multiple of the page size -- but clearly it's not just that, as the page size of 100 gave 600 questions for the tag in Nov'14, but the page size of 37 still gives up at 518). I guess this is connected with the already reported bug of fetch_next returning nothing at unpredictable times, even though here it's buried in the iteration.

But I don't understand at all the code of the next method of StackExchangeResultset in the core.py file...: it starts...:

def next(self):
    for obj in self.items:
        yield obj

    current = self
    while current.has_more:
        for obj in current.items:
            yield obj

won't this yield each item in self.items twice? Once from self.items, and then again from current.items after setting current = self?! I just don't understand the logic of this snippet. I'm going to instrument my code to check for duplicates, which should be present if my doubts are well-founded, and report on that check...

EDIT: yep, confirmed, the duplicates appear exactly as I had thought they would -- I've added a set of ids and return prematurely after seeing a duplicate, and the number of total results reported for each and every month is exactly the page size -- confirming that each question is being yielded again right after all items on the first page have been yielded, exactly as the code I show above appears to say they would be.

So, any suggested workaround so I can examine all Qs meeting the constraints, and, only once each?-)

EDIT AGAIN: so I partly fixed def next(): in the result-set class (there's still a bug I can't yet fathom -- shows duplicates with a page size of 37 -- but at least it seems to work with a page size of 100, with no duplicates nor truncation to a multiple of 100). To make python3 setup.py install work I also had to change setup.py since (at the github master) it was missing some modules (?).

The resulting branch is at https://github.com/aleaxit/Py-StackExchange/tree/betteriter and of course I've also sent a pull request for it. But the gist is to change the above-quoted brokenness into

def next(self):
    current = self
    while True:
        for obj in current.items:
            yield obj
        if not current.has_more:
            return

(no further changes below this).

Answer 5

I am trying to use the Search option to get the list of results from SO.

I have tried using pagesize=50 and I still get large number of titles returned.

Is there another option to limit that search? Sorry if I am posting this the wrong way or in the wrong area but I am new to Stack Overflow and to programming as well :)

This is the part of the code I am referring to:

qs = so.search(intitle=term, pagesize = 50, sort='votes')

Thank you

Answer 6

OK, I'm probably missing the obvious, but how do I get the body of an answer?

For example, in your code snippet:

>>> so = stackexchange.Site('api.stackoverflow.com')
>>> me = so.user(41981)
>>> me.answers.fetch()
>>> me.answers[0].body
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#45>", line 1, in <module>
    me.answers[0].body
AttributeError: 'Answer' object has no attribute 'body'

Answer 7

Possible bug in the latest build? Found this (excellent) library via a Bryce Boe post and dropped in Py-Stackoverflow via easy_install.

Running the script triggered the following, however:

sog@bishop:~/Dropbox/Code/StackOverflow$ ./minestack.py 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./minestack.py", line 3, in <module>
    from stackexchange import Site, StackOverflow
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/py_stackexchange-1.1-py2.6.egg/stackexchange.py", line 6, in <module>
    from stacksites import *

As it's a problem with the library, I thought that pulling it down from GitHub and recompiling might solve the problem. Running the build.sh script in the repo, however, eventually returned this:

[...]
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 904, in endheaders
    self._send_output()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 776, in _send_output
    self.send(msg)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 735, in send
    self.connect()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 716, in connect
    self.timeout)
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

Any ideas as to where I went wrong?

Answer 8

When I try running the code with python 3.4 I always get this error:

AttributeError: 'HTTPMessage' object has no attribute 'getheader'

Here is the full traceback. I'd be very happy if any of you could tell me what the problem is. Is it the fact that I'm using python3? I converted the example files using 2to3 and it seems to me that it should work fine...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".\question.py", line 11, in <module>
    question = site.question(id)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\__init__.py", line 677, in question
    q, = self.questions((nid,), **kw)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\__init__.py", line 473, in __call__
    return self.site._get(Question, ids, 'questions', kw)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\__init__.py", line 623, in _get
    return self.build(root, typ, coll, kw)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\__init__.py", line 600, in build
    json = self._request(url, kw)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\__init__.py", line 572, in _request
    json, info = request_mgr.json_request(url, new_params)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\web.py", line 119, in json_request
    req = self.request(to, params)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\py_stackexchange-1.1_4-py3.4.egg\stackexchange\web.py", line 98, in request
    if conn.info().getheader('Content-Encoding') == 'gzip':
AttributeError: 'HTTPMessage' object has no attribute 'getheader'

Answer 9

Based on the demo *recent_questions.py* example, I am using the following code to retrieve the 10 most recent questions at the command line:

so = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow)
questions = so.recent_questions(pagesize=10)
for q in questions:
    print "question retrieved:", q.title.encode('ascii', 'ignore'), "\t", q.id
    ...

As you can see I am displaying the title and id attributes of each question object.

My question has 2 parts:

1. How can I get a list of attributes to each method (such as recent_questions)? I simply guessed correctly that id would work, but it does not seem to be listed when I refer to >>> help(stackexchange)
2. I would like to extend my script to mark as 'starred' ('favourite') some questions that grab my interest. Is this a reasonable prospect? Is there a method/attribute for this, and in which class? Most importantly, is authentication even possible via the API? This would presumably be necessary in order to 'star' questions.

Answer 10

I'm trying to access different attributes of the Answer class but I get this error:

AttributeError: 'Answer' object has no attribute 'accepted'

I looked into your init.py file and I can see that you have a tuple there that lists the attributes:

transfer = ('accepted', 'locked_date', 'question_id', 'up_vote_count', 'down_vote_count', 'view_count', 'score','community_owned', 'title', 'body')

My intuition is that those attributes should be accessible in some way but it looks that I am doing something wrong. Could you please enlighten me?

Answer 11

Lucas,

Something must have changed in JSON data format sent from the Stack Exchange API because yesterday for no reason I started getting:

    ValueError("Unexpected UTF-8 BOM (decode using utf-8-sig)")

(I searched through many forums, reinstalled python a couple of times etc etc)

As the error says, there is a problem with the encoding. Basically all I had to do is change the encoding type

in the line 157 of the web.py file

from:

    parsed_result = json.loads(req.data.decode('utf8'))

to:

    parsed_result = json.loads(req.data.decode('utf-8-sig'))

and then reinstall the library.

Hope that helps anyone with the same issue...

Answer 12

Quick bug:

Doing this:

anss = so.answers(user_id=175645, pagesize=100, body=True)
ans1 = anss[0]
ans1.owner

Produces this stacktrace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#46>", line 1, in <module>
    a.owner
  File "E:\Projects\Web\Stack2Blog\repos\stack2blog-src-main\stack2blog\stack2blogapp\stackexchange.py", line 218, in <lambda>
    owner = property(lambda self: self._owner if self._owner is not None else self._get_user(self.owner_id), _set_user)
  File "E:\Projects\Web\Stack2Blog\repos\stack2blog-src-main\stack2blog\stack2blogapp\stackexchange.py", line 207, in _get_user
    s._owner = self.site.user(id)
NameError: global name 'self' is not defined

Answer 13

Hi Lucas,

I'm running into an issue finding a user's accept rate. I hope to find it across all the stack exchange sites, but when I pull ii.get_user().unaccepted_questions, it is always an empty list.

    accounts = STACK_AUTH.associated(site, owner_id)
    for ii in accounts:
       questions, unaccepted_questions, site = \
            ii.get_user().questions.count,  \
            ii.get_user().unaccepted_questions.count,  \
            ii.on_site.name

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 14

I was willing yo use your lib to do some statistics on the questions from SO (just for fun, nothing really serious, though it can become serious if I like the results :P).

For this I'd have to get the data from I whole bunch of questions. As an example, I tried to get all questions from roughly 1 month (2e6 seconds). I tried this:

import time
from numpy import *
from stackexchange import *
from stackauth import *

currentDate = floor(time.time())
aWhileAgo = currentDate - 2000000

print currentDate, aWhileAgo


stack_auth = StackAuth()
so = Site(StackOverflow)

questions = list(so.questions(sort=Sort.Creation, order=DESC,\
                    fromdate=aWhileAgo, todate=currentDate) )
for q in questions:
    print q

But this gives me just around 20 questions... is this a limitation of the API? Is there a way around this?

Answer 15

The library currently does not yet support the use of access_token obtained through OAuth 2.0, does it?

Answer 16

import stackexchange so =
stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow)
comment = so.comment(valid_comment_id)

the above code returns the following error in init.py:

    --->166         self.post_type = PostType.from_string(json.post_type)
        167 
        168         def _get_post(self):

AttributeError: DictObject instance has no attribute 'post_type'

I get the valid comment id returned from Firehose JSON streaming event service

Answer 17

Using the most recent version of the library as of yesterday. I needed to get some information on users answers and the question itself. However this didn't work. Every time I tried to access another page of answers I got ()

answers = me.answers.fetch()

answerDetails = []

while True:
    for answer in answers:
        answerDetails.append({
            'question_id'       :answer.question_id,
            'up_vote_count'     :answer.up_vote_count,
            'down_vote_count'   :answer.down_vote_count,
            'accepted'          :answer.accepted
            'tags'              :so.question(answer['question_id']).tags
        })

    answers = answers.fetch_next() #returns ()
    if answers == None or len(answers) == 0:
        break

I had to move the requests to get the tags outside of the loop that got the answers:

#[code cut]

    for answer in answers:
        answerDetails.append({
            'question_id'       :answer.question_id,
            'up_vote_count'     :answer.up_vote_count,
            'down_vote_count'   :answer.down_vote_count,
            'accepted'          :answer.accepted
            #'tags'              :so.question(answer['question_id']).tags
        })

#[code cut]

for answer in answerDetails:
    answer['tags'] = so.question(answer['question_id']).tags

While the latter is for various reasons a better solution, it was quite a surprise that it didn't do what I expected.

A better code sample to reproduce is below:

Doesn't work as expected:

so = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow)
me = so.user(118145)
answers = me.answers.fetch()
so.question(answers[0].question_id).tags
print answers.fetch_next() #prints ()

Works as expected:

so = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow)
me = so.user(118145)
answers = me.answers.fetch()
print answers.fetch_next() #prints the correct array

Answer 18

I am running py-stackexchange v1.1-4 and I'm hitting a strange issue after not touching this library for perhaps eight months or so... My queries used to be relatively fast... I could get results in 30 seconds.

Now my queries literally take hours with the same code... example query:

def filtered_question_dict(sesite, mytags, pagesize=100,
    max_timedelta_hours=24):
    ## Get questions updated in the last 24 hours and not created more than 2 weeks ago

    all = dict()
    now = datetime.now()
    MAX_LAST_DELTA = timedelta(hours=max_timedelta_hours)
    MAX_CREATE_DELTA = timedelta(weeks=2)
    for ii in [sesite.questions.no_answers, sesite.recent_questions,
        sesite.questions.unanswered]:
        ## Iterate over questions, no answers sent, no body sent...
        for qq in ii(pagesize=pagesize, answers=False, body=False):
            qcreate = datetime.fromtimestamp(qq.json['creation_date'])
            qlast = datetime.fromtimestamp(qq.json['last_activity_date'])
            qtags = set(qq.json['tags'])
            if ((now-qlast)>MAX_LAST_DELTA) or \
                ((now-qcreate)>MAX_CREATE_DELTA) or \
                (len(mytags.intersection(qtags))==0):
                continue
            elif not accepted(qq.json):
                all[qtitle] = (qq, mytags, qcreate)
    return all

Just iterating over sesite.questions.no_answers ran for six hours last night before I hit control-C to stop it. I was also sniffing the session... I had pulled over 4000 'pages' in this query...

23467.909060 172.16.1.52 -> 64.34.119.12 HTTP GET /1.1/questions/no-answers?body=false&pagesize=100&answers=false&comments=false&key=REDACTED&page=4688 HTTP/1.1

Maybe Stack Exchange has changed their servers to rate-limit things, but if there is no server-side filtering it seems like the library would be unusable at this rate.

Is there something I should be doing differently?

Answer 19

The API was working but now I receive an error when I try to run the demo examples.
Sample error dump:

/usr/bin/python2.7 /home/donbeo/PycharmProjects/stack_overflow/experience.py
StackOverflow user 41981's experience:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/donbeo/PycharmProjects/stack_overflow/experience.py", line 13, in <module>
    user = so.user(user_id)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/__init__.py", line 699, in user
    u, = self.users((nid,), **kw)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/__init__.py", line 704, in users
    return self._get(User, ids, 'users', kw)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/__init__.py", line 694, in _get
    return self.build(root, typ, coll, kw)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/__init__.py", line 671, in build
    json = self._request(url, kw)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/__init__.py", line 642, in _request
    json, info = request_mgr.json_request(url, new_params)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/web.py", line 139, in json_request
    req = self.request(to, params)
  File "/home/donbeo/Py-StackExchange-master/stackexchange/web.py", line 111, in request
    conn = req_open.open(request)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 410, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 523, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 448, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 382, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 531, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 400: Bad Request

Process finished with exit code 1

How can I solve this?

Answer 20

Two of the demo scripts currently do not work because there is no 'answers' field in the json :(

It might be an ugly workaround, but for now this diff does the trick:

badp@delta:~/Py-StackExchange$ git diff 0a5c60f71310757a4c1de6547cf113c7d6834e85
diff --git a/stackexchange.py b/stackexchange.py
index 959cf3e..4a17b10 100644
--- a/stackexchange.py
+++ b/stackexchange.py
@@ -492,10 +492,12 @@ unlike on the actual site, you will receive an error rathe

        def questions(self, ids, **kw):
                """Retrieves a set of the comments with the IDs specified in the
+               kw["answers"] = "true"
                return self._get(Question, ids, 'questions', kw)

        def recent_questions(self, **kw):
                """Returns the set of the most recent questions on the site, by 
+               kw["answers"] = "true"
                return self.build('questions', Question, 'questions', kw)

        def users_with_badge(self, bid, **kw):

However, this fails to take account of the good points behind the change.

Answer 21

Feature Request

A little feature I think could come in handy.

Right now, there is no way to get the url of a Question/Answer from the Answer object (I'm talking about the actual URL on the site, e.g. stackoverflow.com/answers/id). This is also not returned by the api itself (see this answer).

Ideally, I think the wrapper should include a method that builds the url for you, i.e. the Answer object will have a getUrl method which will build up the url based on which site you're querying.

If not, another good idea would be to provide the Site object with a method that gets the url of the site. When you build a Site object you send in a constant like "api.stackoverflow.com", so the object should have a method which strips out the api part.

Answer 22

Another quick question:

Is there any way to get a user's answers without going through the user object? I want to save a fetch of a user's answers, and since I already have his id, I could go to: http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.8/users/id/answers?body=true&pagesize=100.

I'm just not sure how to do such a thing using the wrapper.

If it doesn't exist, it would probably make sense to be able to do:

# so is my stackexchange object
so.answers(userid=id, other_keywords...)

Also, for bonus points, when getting a user's answers, you get back info on the user as well (e.g. you get the user's display name). So such a call could automatically create the user object that's linked to each answer.

Answer 23

There's a bug with deleted users. Attempting to call question.comments.fetch() on a question that has comments by a deleted users, such as this, results in:

  File "stackcloud.py", line 60, in <module>
    for comment in question.comments.fetch():
  File "stackcore.py", line 151, in fetch
    res = self.site.build(self.url, self.m_type, self.collection, kw)
  File "stackexchange.py", line 341, in build
    return JSONMangler.json_to_resultset(self, json, typ, collection, (self, url, typ, collection, kw))
  File "stackcore.py", line 188, in json_to_resultset
    return cls.paginated_to_resultset(site, json, typ, collection, params)
  File "stackcore.py", line 174, in paginated_to_resultset
    items.append(typ(json_item, site))
  File "stackcore.py", line 19, in __init__
    self._extend(self.json_ob, site)
  File "stackexchange.py", line 105, in _extend
    self.owner_id = json.owner['owner_id'] if 'owner_id' in json.owner else json.owner['user_id']
AttributeError: DictObject instance has no attribute 'owner'

Here's a fix proposal.

Answer 24

I'm building a Django app, and I'l like to be able to search for users' SO account based on their name. I've got the following, which works from a python shell, but this doesn't work when called from within a Django view. Any ideas?

def so_user_search(full_name):
    so = Site(StackOverflow, MY_API_KEY)
    results = so.users([], **{'filter':full_name})
    results = results.fetch()

    result_list = []
    for item in results:
        d = { 
            'id':item.id, 
            'display_name':item.display_name, 
            'url':item.url, 
            'website':item.website_url, 
            'email_hash':item.email_hash
        }   
        result_list.append(d)
    return result_list

Answer 25

I'm running a program using py-stackexchange that gets an error,

HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error

Do you have any debugging suggestions? If I could turn on a debugging flag, that would cause py-SE to print the exact URL that was requested, that would help... Then I could visit that URL myself in the browser and see if a more detailed error message was shown, such as "your parameter X was invalid" or "you've exceeded your API key limit" or something.

I could modify __init__.py myself to print such debugging messages, but I'm not up on how to recompile python functions within an egg and redeploy them.

Thanks...

Update:

P.S. It wasn't my intention to ask you to find the actual problem, but heck, I'd be just as happy to have that answer as to have the debugging tool described above, and it might be easier to supply. So here's my code:

currentDate = floor(time.time())
aWhileAgo = currentDate - 10

# E.g. fromdate=1293840000&todate=1294444800

questions = so.questions(sort=Sort.Creation, order=DESC, fromdate=aWhileAgo, \
    todate=currentDate)

The last line is where I get the 500 error.

But calling this URL directly (which is what I think py-SE should be using under the hood):

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/questions?fromdate=1305580368&order=desc&sort=creation&todate=1305580478

is successful.

P.P.S.

If I take away the fromdate and todate keywords, it runs successfully:

questions = so.questions(sort=Sort.Creation, order=DESC)

So I guess the problem has to do with those keywords. Probably I'm using Py-SE incorrectly (as opposed to trying to get the SE API to do something it's not designed to do).

SOLVED.

I figured it out: I'm supposed to pass from_date and to_date, not fromdate and todate, despite the SE API parameter names.

I figured that out by guessing. Next, I would like to know how I was supposed to find that out? Naming conventions? If so, where are they documented? Just by example?

Answer 26

support

How can I access the q in the questions method?

In the Stack Exchange API, Usage of /search/advanced:

q - a free form text parameter, will match all question properties based on an undocumented algorithm.

Answer 27

Seems very unreliable to me. Using the GitHub number of answers example results in a NeedsAwoken error, while the scrolling list of questions makes a StackExchangeError.

List of errors (community can add to this):

• NeedsAwokenError
• StackExchangeError

How do I solve this problem?

Answer 28

I can't figure out how to fetch the text body of the answers and comments to a question given the question id. Also I can't figure out what are the supported sites(variable Name) in the method name stackexchange.site(Name,api_key) . Can anybody provide me with the list of supported sites of stackexchange and what exactly should be provided in the variable Name during method invocation? Here's the code snippet I've written so far:

import stackexchange site = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow, app_key=None) site.be_inclusive() for e in url_list: if stack_id(e): question = site.question(stack_id(e)) print('--- %s ---' % question.title) print(question.body) print() print(question.answers) Please can somebody help me figure this out? I'm using Python 3.4.3 and latest version of Py-StackExchange.

Answer 29

First things first: Thank you very much for your efforts in building this Python package. It saves me lots of hours for sure. Keep up the good work.

Nevertheless, I have a small issue when fetching data from the Stackoverflow site. I try to load a specific user object and would like to get reputation as well as up vote count, down vote count and view count. Fetching reputation works well, but when I try to access the other attributes, such as up_vote_count, I fail.

Here is my code so far:

so = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow)
so_user_obj = so.user(so_user_id)
so_user_obj.badges.fetch()
so_user_obj.questions.fetch()
so_user_obj.answers.fetch()
user_dict['reputation'] = so_user_obj.reputation
user_dict['questions_asked'] = len(so_user_obj.questions)
user_dict['answers_posted'] = len(so_user_obj.answers)
user_dict['badges_earned'] = len(so_user_obj.badges)
user_dict['up_votes_received'] = so_user_obj.up_vote_count
user_dict['down_votes_received'] = so_user_obj.down_vote_count
user_dict['profile_views'] = so_user_obj.view_count

When running the code, I can fetch reputation successfully, but get this error for the other attribute:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./stacktrack.py", line 405, in <module>
    user_data = so_get_user_obj_as_dict(so_user_obj)
  File "./stacktrack.py", line 193, in so_get_user_obj_as_dict
    user_dict['up_votes_received'] = so_user_obj.up_vote_count
AttributeError: 'User' object has no attribute 'up_vote_count'

I actually thought, that up_vote_count, down_vote_count and view_count are part of the response, because of this code in models.py (~ line 342):

class User(JSONModel):
    """Describes a user on a StackExchange site."""
    transfer = ('display_name', 'profile_image', 'age', 'website_url',
        'location', 'about_me', 'view_count', 'up_vote_count',
        'down_vote_count', 'account_id', 'profile_image',
        ('creation_date', UNIXTimestamp),
        ('last_access_date', UNIXTimestamp),
        ('reputation', FormattedReputation),
        ...

What am I doing wrong here?

I use Python 3.4.3 with py-stackexchange 2.2.7 (installed via pip3).

Any help highly appreciated!

Thank you André

Answer 30

I have been experiencing some throttle issues when trying to fetch timeline data for some users. I get a: stackexchange.core.StackExchangeError: 502 [throttle_violation]: Violation of backoff parameter exception after the api handles some requests...

The weird thing is I'm using:

so.impose_throttling = True
so.throttle_stop = False

So I really don't understand why py-stackexchange does not handle the overloading requests and make my application wait until it can make more requests... What am I doing wrong?