Project X #19 ~ Build a Beginner-Friendly Reddit Web Scraper with BeautifulSoup

Learn how to scrape Reddit with Python, extract Python topics and discussions, and save data to JSON & CSV—step-by-step guide for beginners.

If you’ve spent any time learning Python, you probably noticed something fast: Python is everywhere. It runs websites, automates boring tasks, analyzes data, powers machine learning models, and a boat load of other things.

One of the more practical ways to use Python, especially if you’re just starting out, is web scraping. This means automatically collecting data from websites.

In this project, we’re going to build out a Reddit web scraper using BeautifulSoup.

Reddit is one of the biggest online communities out there, full of subreddits, which are topic-specific forums covering everything from cat memes to advanced programming.

We’ll focus on three subreddits that are especially useful for anyone learning or working with Python: r/Python, r/Programming, and r/learnpython.

Welcome to Project X – where dreams meet code! Dive into creativity as I guide you through the creation of a captivating project, step by step, in each monthly edition. From conceptualization to execution. Join premium today!

By the end of this project, you’ll have a Python script that can visit any subreddit automatically, grab related topics and active discussions, and save everything into JSON and CSV files.

Along the way, you’ll learn not just how to write a scraper, but I also hope to show you guys my thought process too. You’ll see how to fetch HTML from a page, parse it in a way that makes sense, filter the information you actually care about, and organize it so it’s easy to analyze later.

And don’t worry if this is your first time doing something like this. I’ll walk you through every step so you can follow along without feeling lost.

Before we start, make sure you have these packages installed:

pip3 install requests beautifulsoup4

I’ll link the previous Project X, Build a Secure API with FastAPI, JWT, and SQLAlchemy for future reference.

👉 Premium readers can access the Video and Source Code.

👉 Gain access to my full article archive.

👉 Recommend projects at the bottom.

These projects take a lot of time and resources for me to craft in a way that I can present them and share them for you all.

Thank you for allowing me to do work that I find meaningful. This is my full-time job so I hope you will support me!

👉 If you value projects like this one, please leave it a ❤️ and share it with others. This helps more people discover these projects, which helps me out!

I’ve linked the Git repo and a full video to this project as always at the bottom. So if you’re ready to create something interactive, useful, and fun, let’s dive in—we’re just getting started!