Comment trees

A Reddit comment thread is a tree: comments hold replies, replies hold more replies. comments reads that tree and flattens it into one record per comment, keeping each comment's depth and parent so the shape survives the flattening.

Reading a thread

reddit comments 1abc23

The argument is a post id or a full comment-page URL. Each record carries the comment id and full name, the link and parent ids, the subreddit and author, the body, the score, the created and edited timestamps, and the depth. A depth-aware tool can rebuild the tree from parent_id; a flat reader can sort by depth and read top to bottom.

Sorting and capping

Comments sort the way the site offers:

reddit comments 1abc23 --sort top
reddit comments 1abc23 --sort new
reddit comments 1abc23 --sort qa

--sort takes confidence (the site default, "best"), top, new, controversial, old, or qa. Cap how many you pull with -n:

reddit comments 1abc23 --sort top -n 200

--depth asks Reddit to return only the first N levels of the tree, which keeps a huge thread manageable when you only want the top of the conversation:

reddit comments 1abc23 --depth 2

Following "load more"

A deep or wide thread does not ship every comment in the first response. Reddit collapses the tail into "load more" stubs that name the hidden comment ids. --expand follows those stubs through the morechildren endpoint and folds the extra comments into the result:

reddit comments 1abc23 --expand

This costs extra requests (one per batch of hidden ids), so it is off by default. Leave it off for a quick read of the visible thread; turn it on when you need the whole discussion.

Piping a thread

Because each comment is its own record, a thread pipes cleanly. Pull every body out of a thread:

reddit comments 1abc23 --sort top -o jsonl | jq -r .body

Count comments by author:

reddit comments 1abc23 -o jsonl | jq -r .author | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn