short-jokes-dataset

This repository contains all the python scripts used to build Short Jokes dataset. The dataset contains 231,657 short jokes scraped from various websites.

All the web scraper scripts are present in the /scripts/scrapers/ folder. These scripts are written for specific websites (website link mentioned in the header of each file) and they generate csv files of jokes in /data/ folder with the fixed format: ID, Joke.

Scrapers were written only for those websites which allowed scraping and there were no CAPTCHA or any blocking javascripts for information gathering bots.

Jokes from subreddits /r/jokes and /r/cleanjokes are extracted using scripts/scrapers/subredditarchive.py. The script uses PRAW, a Reddit API wrapper which uses timestamp search for finding posts between given timestamps on a particular subreddit. Following Reddit's API terms of use, request for data is made every 2 seconds. For each subreddit, posts are downloaded from the day of creation of subreddit to 31st January, 2017. The script generates a json file for each post in a separate folder. Json dumps for both the subreddits can be accessed from here (Uncompressed 2.3GB). Jokes from all the json files are extracted and written to a csv file using scripts/json_to_csv.py.

scripts/merge_csvs.py removes the duplicates from all the csv files and merges the jokes into a single csv to get the final dataset shortjokes.csv.

Contributions

• If you are aware of any resource (preferably large) of good clean jokes, feel free to suggest or send a pull request with scraper script and csv file in the above format.
• Any other positive suggestions for the dataset are welcome.