Scrape popular questions from forums

To scrape popular questions from forums, you’ll need to:

1. Choose Your Target Forums
   Popular options include:

   • Reddit (e.g., subreddits like r/AskReddit, r/NoStupidQuestions, r/AskScience)

   • Quora

   • Stack Exchange sites (e.g., Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Ubuntu)

   • Niche forums (e.g., Warrior Forum for marketing, Bogleheads for finance)

2. Use Tools to Scrape Content
   Methods include:

   a. Web Scraping with Python

   • Libraries:

     • requests (fetch HTML)

     • BeautifulSoup (parse HTML)

     • pandas (for data structuring)

     • Selenium (if content is JavaScript-rendered)

   • Example:

     python
     CopyEdit
     import requests
     from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
     
     url = 'https://www.quora.com/topic/Content-Writing-1'
     headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
     response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
     soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
     
     for question in soup.find_all('span', {'class': 'q-box qu-mb--tiny'}):
         print(question.get_text(strip=True))
     

   b. Reddit API (PRAW)

   python
   CopyEdit
   import praw
   
   reddit = praw.Reddit(
       client_id='YOUR_CLIENT_ID',
       client_secret='YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET',
       user_agent='YOUR_USER_AGENT'
   )
   
   subreddit = reddit.subreddit('AskReddit')
   for post in subreddit.hot(limit=20):
       print(post.title)
   

   c. Stack Exchange API

   • Use their API: https://api.stackexchange.com

   • Example endpoint: https://api.stackexchange.com/2.3/questions?order=desc&sort=hot&site=stackoverflow

3. Extract, Clean, and Store Questions

   • Remove duplicates, HTML tags, or non-question titles.

   • Store in CSV, database, or a simple text file.

4. Optional: Use Scraping Tools/Services

   • Scrapy (framework)

   • Octoparse, ParseHub (no-code tools)

   • Apify or SerpAPI for APIs with built-in scraping solutions

Would you like a ready-to-run Python script for a specific forum?