XKCD Scraper

Let's download all the XKCD comics and their titles! Why not use a browser plugin? Because you are a geek (or just want to look cool among your friends 😆)!!!

NOTICE

I'm not using this project anymore so some things might be broken from time to time but please file an issue and we can work together to make it work again and resolve the issues.

Setup Instructions

Why are you even reading this (unless you are somebody new to Python)???

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/hashhar/xkcd-scraper.git
# Install dependencies
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# Run the program
python3 xkcd-scraper.py --your-arguments

You can also install this within a Python virtual environment like so:

# Create a virtual env
python3 -m venv venv
# Activate the virtual env
source venv/bin/activate
# Install dependencies within the virtual env
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# Run the program
python3 xkcd-scraper.py --your-arguments

Command Line Options

Unfortunately, you will need to provide command line parameters everytime you run the script (because I am a bad, bad man 😈)

• -o directory, --output-dir directory
  Changes the output directory to directory.
  The default output directory is the current working directory.

• N
  This will fetch the comic number N from xkcd where N is an integer or a set of integers greater than or equal to 0.
  Use 0 to fetch the latest comic.

• -r M N, --range M N
  Fetches comics within the range M to N.
  -r 3 30, --range 3 30 will fetch the comics from 3 to 30.

• -a, --all
  Fetches all the comics from the first one to the latest.

• -x N, --random N
  Fetches N pseudo-random (because, well, the world is not fair) comics. You can specify how many you want to fetch as -x 10, --random 30. This will fetch 30 random comics.

• -t, --title
  Appends the title of the comic to the filename of the downloaded comic

Comments

I am still working on it so feel free to contribute code and file issues and feature requests.

Food For Thought

Is there anything that is totally random? - StackExchange
Randomness vs Unpredictability - Wikipedia
Can we sure that randomeness exists? - Quora