python flag for `--output` to export chats to json?

is there a python flag for --output so I can export chats to json?

I see this in the CLI documentation (you included -o flag in your cmd) but not for the ChatDownloader().get_chat() … I need this json so I can pd.read_json for ETL of chat data

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-106-472d1877d159> in <module>
----> 1 chat = ChatDownloader().get_chat(url=url,message_types=["text_message", "paid_message", "membership_item"],output=outfile)

TypeError: get_chat() got an unexpected keyword argument 'output'

__Originally posted by @atnjqt in https://github.com/xenova/chat-downloader/issues/61#issuecomment-778847756__

[xenova]

Hi there!

This functionality has been included in the code, but not in the get_chat method. The get_chat method was only responsible for returning a an iterable Chat object (hence the get in the name). This Chat object has the ability to generate more messages (using http requests) when needed.

File output and other more advanced processing should be the responsibility of the user implementing the code. That being said, there are ways to use the module’s outputting functionality as I will describe later.

Early into development, users wanted a way to continuously write to file. Since this is not standard functionality for file IO in python, the continuous_write.py module was created.

Now, there are many ways to use this, but I will describe 2:

1. Using ContinuousWriter

from chat_downloader import ChatDownloader
from chat_downloader.output.continuous_write import ContinuousWriter

# We now create a ContinuousWriter object and set options. Different
# options are allowed for different output formats:
#
# - JSON: file_name, overwrite=False, indent=None, separator=', ', indent_character=' ', sort_keys=True
# - CSV: file_name, overwrite=False, sort_keys=True
# - TXT: file_name, overwrite=False
#
# All values except file_name are optional, and assume the default values listed above


file_name = 'output.json' # or 'output.csv' or 'output.txt'

writer = ContinuousWriter(file_name, overwrite=True)

url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A'
chat = ChatDownloader().get_chat(url)   # create a generator

try:
    for message in chat:                    # iterate over messages
        writer.write(message)
        print(chat.format(message))         # print the formatted message
finally:
    writer.close()

1. Using run. Alternatively, if your program’s functionality matches that of the command line interface, you can “simulate” running it from the command line using the run(**kwargs) method:

from chat_downloader import run

url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A'
file_name = 'output.json'  # or 'output.csv' or 'output.txt'
run(
    url=url,
    output=file_name,
    overwrite=True
)

This option is less suitable if you need more control.

[xenova]

of course a quiet arg makes sense, thanks for this! I missed that when skimming through the documentation …

No worries! Yeah, the documentation still needs a lot of work… 😅