script to extract reviews

extract_reviews_distrowatch.py

@@ -0,0 +1,122 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
+"""extract_reviews_distrowatch.ipynb
+
+Automatically generated by Colab.
+
+Original file is located at
+    https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1RZzzKmKsBL3KzWLmtgQh7cJvIVmQYFSO
+
+# SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF DISTROWATCH REVIEWS.
+
+## Part 1: Web scraping and data collection
+"""
+
+from google.colab import drive
+drive.mount('/content/drive')
+
+# Commented out IPython magic to ensure Python compatibility.
+# %cd /content/drive/MyDrive/Colab_Notebooks/distrowatch NLP
+
+import requests
+from pickle import dump as pickle_dump, load as pickle_load
+import pandas as pd
+try:
+  import scrapy
+except:
+  ModuleNotFoundError
+  !uv pip install scrapy --quiet
+  import scrapy
+!uv pip install selenium --quiet
+
+"""Now with more distros"""
+
+headers = {
+    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
+}
+url_popularity = 'https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity'
+sel = scrapy.Selector(text=requests.get(url_popularity, headers=headers).text)
+
+distros = list(set(sel.xpath('//td[@class = "phr2"]/a/@href').extract()))
+distros[:10]
+
+# with open("distro_names", "wb") as f:
+#   pickle_dump(distros, f)
+# distros[:10]
+
+# with open("distro_names", "rb") as f:
+#   distros = pickle_load(f)
+# distros[:10]
+
+# if we want to focus only on some distros we can provide them in a list
+# distros = ['ubuntu','fedora','opensuse','mint','manjaro','debian','kali','endeavour','zorin','parrot','mx']
+
+dfs = []
+
+for distro in distros:
+    url_rating = f'https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=ratings&distro={distro}'
+    try:
+        response = requests.get(url_rating, headers=headers, timeout=(60, 60))
+        response.raise_for_status()
+    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
+        print(f"{distro}: failed with error {e}")
+        continue
+
+    sel = scrapy.Selector(text=response.text)
+
+    project = sel.xpath('//td[@class = "News1"]//table[2]//tr/td[1]/text()[3]').extract()
+    version = sel.xpath('//td[@class = "News1"]//table[2]//tr/td[1]/text()[4]').extract()
+    rating = sel.xpath('//td[@class = "News1"]//table[2]//tr/td[1]/text()[5]').extract()
+    date_review = sel.xpath('//td[@class = "News1"]//table[2]//tr/td[1]/text()[6]').extract()
+    votes = sel.xpath('//td[@class = "News1"]//table[2]//tr/td[1]/text()[7]').extract()
+    reviews = sel.xpath('//td[@class = "News1"]//table[2]//tr/td[2]/text()').extract()
+
+    if not reviews:
+        print(distro + ': no reviews')
+        continue
+
+    # Different paragraphs in the same review are separated by `/r`, but different reviews are separated by `\n`.
+    # Also, there is another `\n` character at the beggining of the next review.
+    # In order to split the reviews correctly we can first "glue" all reviews and then use the pattern `'\n\n'` to separate reviews.
+    reviews = ''.join(reviews).split('\n\n')
+    df_distro = pd.DataFrame({'date': date_review,
+                              'project': project,
+                              'version': version,
+                              'rating': rating,
+                              'votes': votes,
+                              'review': reviews})
+
+    dfs.append(df_distro)
+
+df = pd.concat(dfs)
+df = (
+    df.assign(date=pd.to_datetime(df['date']),
+              votes=pd.to_numeric(df['votes']),
+              rating=pd.to_numeric(df['rating']))
+    .reset_index(drop=True)
+)
+
+df.to_csv('distrowatch_2.csv') # 6th April 2025
+
+df.head()
+
+df.groupby('project')['rating'].describe().sort_values(by='count',ascending=False)
+
+df_list = [pd.read_csv(f'distrowatch_{i}.csv', index_col=0,lineterminator='\n') for i in range(1,3)]
+full_df = pd.concat(df_list) \
+.drop_duplicates() \
+.reset_index(drop=True)
+
+full_df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(full_df['date'])
+full_df['review'] = full_df['review'].str.strip().str.replace('\r+', ' ', regex=True)
+full_df['project'] = full_df['project'].str.strip()
+
+full_df
+
+full_df.info()
+
+full_df.iloc[0,5]
+
+full_df.to_csv('full_distrowatch.csv', index=False)
+
+
+