MoreComments.comments() return value

I’ve noticed an inconsistency in the way that MoreComments.comments() are being returned. Not sure if this is intended behavior or not, but I’ve found it very difficult to work around.

Here’s an example:

reddit = praw.Reddit(user_agent='reddit terminal viewer v0.0')
submission = reddit.get_submission('http://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/31owr1/game_thread_ncaa_national_championship_wisconsin/')
for comment in submission.comments:
    if isinstance(comment, praw.objects.MoreComments):
        print('MoreComments')
    else:
        print(comment._replies)

returns something like this

[<praw.objects.Comment object at 0x7f63d2b1a9e8>, <praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d2b1aac8>]
[<praw.objects.Comment object at 0x7f63d2b1ada0>, <praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d2b1aeb8>]
[<praw.objects.Comment object at 0x7f63d2b25080>, <praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d2b252b0>]
[<praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d2b25438>]
[<praw.objects.Comment object at 0x7f63d2b25668>, <praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d2b25828>]
[]
[<praw.objects.Comment object at 0x7f63d2b25ac8>, <praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d2b25dd8>]
[<praw.objects.Comment object at 0x7f63d227a048>]
[<praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d227a588>]
[]
[<praw.objects.MoreComments object at 0x7f63d227a8d0>]

However, doing the same loop over for comment in more_comments_object.comments(update=True) returns

None
MoreComments
[]
None
MoreComments
None
MoreComments
None
MoreComments
[]
[]
[]

It looks like in the second case the MoreComments aren’t getting attached the their parent’s replies. All of the None values should actually be [MoreComments]. E.g.

[MoreComments]
[]
[MoreComments]
[MoreComments]
[MoreComments]
[]
[]
[]

As a result, trying to build a comment tree by flattening each comment.replies inserts duplicate replies into the tree and makes a bunch of unnecessary calls to api/comments/id instead of /api/morechildren.

[michael-lazar]

Here’s what I did in case anyone else comes across this issue. Note that I had to use hasattr(comment, 'replies') instead of comment.replies to avoid the hidden http call. https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv/blob/58f58f816736b18cd2985c39e38b052cd663e645/rtv/content.py#L49

[bboe]

@michael-lazar I thought about modifying the return value for the More objects to return a forest rather than a flat list. However, I’d prefer to keep the structure of the return similar to how Reddit returns the values. You should be able to build any such tree in your own code.