kendreaditya/reddit

Reddit

Search and browse Reddit via the public JSON API. No API key needed — just curl + jq.

Prerequisites

which curl jq

Common Header

All requests need a User-Agent header. Use this throughout:

-H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0"

Rate limiting: Reddit throttles aggressively. Add sleep 2 between sequential requests. If you get HTTP 429 or empty responses, back off 5-10 seconds.

Search All of Reddit

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/search.json?q=QUERY&limit=10&sort=relevance' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" \
  | jq -r '.data.children[] | .data | "\(.title)\n  r/\(.subreddit) | \(.score) pts | \(.num_comments) comments | u/\(.author)\n  https://reddit.com\(.permalink)\n"'

Parameters

| Param | Values | Default | |-------|--------|---------| | q | search query (URL-encoded) | required | | sort | relevance, hot, new, top, comments | relevance | | t | hour, day, week, month, year, all | all | | limit | 1-100 | 25 | | after | pagination token from response | — |

Search within a subreddit

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/search.json?q=QUERY&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&limit=10' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" \
  | jq -r '.data.children[] | .data | "\(.title) [\(.score) pts, \(.num_comments) comments]\n  https://reddit.com\(.permalink)\n"'

restrict_sr=on limits results to that subreddit.

Browse a Subreddit

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/hot.json?limit=10' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" \
  | jq -r '.data.children[] | .data | "\(.title)\n  \(.score) pts | \(.num_comments) comments | u/\(.author) | id: \(.id)\n"'

Replace hot with new, top, rising, or controversial. For top, add &t=day (or week, month, year, all).

JSON output for further processing

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/top.json?t=week&limit=10' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" \
  | jq '[.data.children[] | .data | {title, score, num_comments, author, id, url, created: (.created_utc | todate), selftext: .selftext[0:200]}]'

Read a Post + Comments

The response is a JSON array: [0] is the post, [1] is the comment tree.

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/comments/POST_ID.json?limit=20&sort=top' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" -o /tmp/reddit_thread.json

# Post details
jq '.[0].data.children[0].data | {title, score, author, selftext, url, num_comments, created: (.created_utc | todate)}' /tmp/reddit_thread.json

# Top comments
jq -r '.[1].data.children[] | select(.kind == "t1") | .data | "u/\(.author) (\(.score) pts):\n  \(.body[0:300])\n"' /tmp/reddit_thread.json

Comment sort options

Set sort param: top, best, new, controversial, old, qa.

If you only have a full Reddit URL

Append .json to any Reddit URL:

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/r/python/comments/abc123/some_title/.json?limit=20' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0"

User Activity

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME.json?limit=10' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" \
  | jq -r '.data.children[] | .data | "\(if .title then .title else "Comment in r/\(.subreddit)" end)\n  \(.score) pts | r/\(.subreddit) | https://reddit.com\(.permalink)\n"'

Filter to posts only or comments only

# Posts only
curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME/submitted.json?limit=10' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" | jq '...'

# Comments only
curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME/comments.json?limit=10' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0" | jq '...'

Pagination

Every listing response includes data.after — pass it as &after=TOKEN to get the next page:

curl -s 'https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/new.json?limit=25&after=t3_abc123' \
  -H "User-Agent: claude-reddit-skill/1.0"

Extract the token: jq -r '.data.after' response.json

Tips

• Always single-quote URLs in curl to avoid shell interpretation of &
• Use -o /tmp/file.json for large responses, then parse with jq separately
• .selftext contains the post body (empty for link posts)
• .url is the linked URL (for link posts) or the permalink (for self posts)
• Timestamps: .created_utc | todate converts to ISO 8601
• For subreddit info/rules: https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/about.json

Troubleshooting

| Issue | Fix | |-------|-----| | Empty response / 0 bytes | Rate limited — wait 5s and retry | | HTTP 429 | Back off 10-15s | | HTML instead of JSON | Add -L flag to follow redirects, or use old.reddit.com | | 403 Forbidden | Change User-Agent to a browser-like string |