Play-Scrape

A simple Play Store comments scraper written in Python

The aim of this project is to provide an easy yet functional module for scraping Google Play Store comments. I use this personally for text mining projects that I'll publish later.

Usage:

python play_scrape.py --pages <pages> --id <app_id> --output <outfile.json>

Where:

• --pages are the number of pages to scrape, usually a page contains 40 reviews
• --id is the app id, ex com.facebook.katana
• --output is the name of the file where you want to store your results, default name is output.json

Example:

python play_scrape.py  --pages 10 --id posteitaliane.posteapp.apppostepay --output poste.json

__________.__                   _________                                  
\______   \  | _____  ___.__.  /   _____/ ________________  ______   ____  
 |     ___/  | \__  \<   |  |  \_____  \_/ ___\_  __ \__  \ \____ \_/ __ \ 
 |    |   |  |__/ __ \___  |  /        \  \___|  | \// __ \|  |_> >  ___/ 
 |____|   |____(____  / ____| /_______  /\___  >__|  (____  /   __/ \___  >
                    \/\/              \/     \/           \/|__|        \/ 
                    Author Ancarani Riccardo
[*] Downloading the first 10 pages from: posteitaliane.posteapp.apppostepay
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews
[*] Retrieved 40 reviews

Output:

The output is a JSON file with this structure:

{
  "results" : [ { "rating" : <rating>,
                  "review" : <review> } , ...
}

Note:

This script currently only supports Italian comments, the generalization will be quite easy and I'll do it in the next future. There is also a Jupyter Notebook in this repo, it's the first version of this script, really messy.