How to export every comment from a Reddit thread

Why copy-paste and simple scrapers miss comments

A popular thread can have thousands of comments, but the page loads only the first few hundred. The rest is folded into "load more comments" stubs, and deep reply chains continue on separate pages. Tools that read only the first page silently miss most of the discussion.

Thread Exporter asks Reddit for each hidden branch, then rebuilds the tree, so replies stay under the comment they answer, with their depth, score and date.

What are the ways to export a Reddit thread?

There are four common methods. The two free ones without code (copy-paste and the .json link) only get the comments the page has already loaded. To get the hidden replies too, you need the official API with a script, or a tool that does those calls for you.

The free .json trick, and where it stops

Add .json to the end of any Reddit thread link (for example reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/abc123/title/.json) and Reddit returns the post and its comments as JSON, with authors, scores, dates and the reply tree. It costs nothing and needs no account, which makes it the best option for a small thread.

The catch: the answer contains only the comments the page would have loaded. Every folded branch appears as a “more” object listing comment IDs, which you then have to fetch one batch at a time with the morechildren endpoint and stitch back into the tree. On a thread with thousands of comments, that is hundreds of extra requests.

With the official API and PRAW

If you write Python, PRAW is the standard library. Register a script app in your Reddit preferences, load the thread with reddit.submission(url=…), call submission.comments.replace_more(limit=None) to expand every hidden branch, then loop over submission.comments.list() and write each comment to a CSV.

Reddit’s free Data API tier allows 100 requests a minute per OAuth app, and each replace_more call expands only a batch of comments, so a thread with 10,000 comments takes several minutes. Commercial use needs Reddit’s approval. For research projects that run regularly, the API is the right tool; for a one-off export, an extension is faster.

What you get in the CSV

One row per comment: subreddit, thread id and title, comment id, parent id, depth, author, whether it is the original poster, score, date (UTC), edited flag, text and a permalink. The first row is the post itself.

With the parent id you can rebuild conversations in a spreadsheet, and with the score you can sort for the most useful answers.

Is it allowed?

The extension reads public content you can see in your browser, at Reddit's published rate limit. Respect Reddit's terms and the people who wrote the comments: don't republish personal information, and cite your sources.