Write the source contract before changing code
Use this exercise to change one component of an existing collector. Write down what its consumer requires: which information must be present, whether historical content is acceptable and what to do when no usable post arrives. These are acceptance rules for your code, not capabilities granted by an API key. They give the migration a result you can inspect beyond an HTTP success.
Reddit Scraping queries an independent historical archive. It does not crawl a supplied URL, fetch current Reddit pages or bypass access restrictions. It is not affiliated with Reddit and offers no posting, voting, private messages or Reddit OAuth. Decide whether available historical posts can serve your application before removing a component whose task was to observe the current site.
Receive one page and classify the outcome
Use GET https://api.redditscraping.com/v1/posts?subreddit=webscraping&limit=3 with X-API-Key: <key> or Authorization: Bearer <key>. The community restriction and small limit provide an inspection step, not proof of relevant posts or equivalent coverage. Save the received response and query parameters. Compare actual available fields with your own parser output instead of assuming a permanent, normalized record schema.
Give the intake step separate outcomes for request failure, successful empty input and records awaiting validation. If a response is empty, do not manufacture a blank post to keep later stages running. If a required value is absent, preserve the source response and the reason for rejection. A local rejection and an API error describe different events and should remain distinguishable.
Normalize only after accepting the source record
Keep a raw-response stage before your mapping stage. Check the data array and distinguish successful empty results from malformed responses or HTTP failures. For each available record, preserve its identifier when present and validate fields required by your consumer. Separate absent text, an empty string and a rejected record so your migration report can explain what happened to each input.
For a text consumer, keep received text alongside any locally normalized version. Apply only transformations your consumer needs, such as its whitespace rules, and record the rule version. Do not silently turn missing text into an empty observation. Preserve an available source identifier for comparison; if you remove duplicate inputs, retain enough information to explain that local decision without claiming the archive itself is duplicate-free.
Put a boundary around the collection run
Each request returns at most 100 records; one query permits at most 100 pages, one page per request. Interpret total with relation: eq exact, gte a lower bound, unknown unreliable or null. Do not treat unknown as zero or an exact total as proof of complete download. Partitioning requests and deduplicating locally can organize your collected material but cannot establish full archive coverage.
Replay transformations from the response you saved
Use a saved response as the input when checking a revised mapper. That separates a change in your code from a different result in a new remote request. Compare accepted, rejected and empty outcomes against the consumer’s requirements. File naming, storage duration and access controls are your choices. Saving a response locally does not create a server snapshot or guarantee that the same records remain available remotely.
Decide which part of the old collector can retire
What can be removed? The HTML download and selector logic used solely to obtain the historical material that your new intake accepts. What stays? Scheduling, field checks, normalization, storage and the explanation of missing input. If the old collector also served a current-page requirement, leave that requirement unresolved rather than labeling the archive a complete replacement. Record the scope of the switch before enabling the next scheduled job.
Cache original responses when useful and version your local mapping rules so you can rerun analysis over your saved files. A fresh remote query need not return identical records. Handle 400, 401, 402 and 429 according to the documentation. One successful retrieval, even empty or repeated, costs one credit; client response loss can follow billable success. Consult pricing and the key page for account operations, not /v1/status, whose static disclosure does not show balances or search health.
