Python PRAW – Getting the time when a comment was posted on Reddit

In Reddit, we can post a comment to any submission, we can also comment on a comment to create a thread of comments. Here we will see how to fetch the exact time when a comment was posted using PRAW. We will be using the created_utc attribute of the Comment class to fetch the Unix time when the comment was posted.

Example 1 : Consider the following comment :

The ID of the comment is : fvib7aw

# importing the module
import praw
from datetime import datetime

# initialize with appropriate values
client_id = ""
client_secret = ""
username = ""
password = ""
user_agent = ""

# creating an authorized reddit instance
reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id = client_id,
                     client_secret = client_secret,
                     username = username,
                     password = password,
                     user_agent = user_agent)

# the ID of the comment
comment_id = "fvib7aw"

# instantiating the Comment class
comment = reddit.comment(comment_id)

# fetching the Unix time
unix_time = comment.created_utc

print("The comment was posted on Unix time : " +
      str(unix_time))

# converting the Unix time
print("The comment was posted on : " +
      str(datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_time)))

Output :

The comment was posted on Unix time : 1592712950.0
The comment was posted on : 2020-06-21 09:45:50

Example 2 : Consider the following comment:

The ID of the comment is : fv9qvgo

# importing the module
import praw
from datetime import datetime

# initialize with appropriate values
client_id = ""
client_secret = ""
username = ""
password = ""
user_agent = ""

# creating an authorized reddit instance
reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id = client_id,
                     client_secret = client_secret,
                     username = username,
                     password = password,
                     user_agent = user_agent)

# the ID of the comment
comment_id = "fv9qvgo"

# instantiating the Comment class
comment = reddit.comment(comment_id)

# fetching the Unix time
unix_time = comment.created_utc

print("The comment was posted on Unix time : " +
      str(unix_time))

# converting the Unix time
print("The comment was posted on : " +
      str(datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_time)))

Output :

The comment was posted on Unix time : 1592513850.0
The comment was posted on : 2020-06-19 02:27:30