[Deprecated] Use TEDscraper2 instead.

TEDscraper

Scrape TED talk data including transcripts in over 100 languages from TED.com

Requirements

Python 3
Beautiful Soup 4
fake-useragent
lxml
Pandas
Requests

Usage

# move to TEDscraper directory
# import module (or use Jupyter Notebook)
from TEDscraper import TEDscraper

# instantiate the scraper & pass in optional arguments
scraper = TEDscraper(lang_code='en', urls='all', topics='all')

# scrape the data and save it to a dictionary
ted_dict = scraper.get_data()

# transform the dictionary to a sorted pandas DataFrame
df = scraper.to_dataframe(ted_dict)

# output DataFrame as CSV
df.to_csv('../data/ted_talks.csv', index=False)

Here is a list of other output formats Pandas docs.

Parameters

• lang_code
  • English is the default language lang_code='en'
  • You can pass in other language codes using the lang_code param
  • TED translators don't always translate all features
    • Ex: Title and 'About Speaker' might be in English while the transcript is translated to French
• urls
  • All urls are scraped by default for the selected language urls='all'
  • You may pass in a list of urls. However, there are a few limitations:
    • TED must have the talks available in the language you specify
    • Only one language can be provided per scrape call
• topics
  • All topics are scraped by default topics='all'
  • You may pass in a list of topics to filter by them
• force_fetch
  • Talks with known issues are skipped by default force_fetch=False
  • Set it to 'True' to attempt to scrape
  • See talks with known issues
• exclude_transcript
  • All features are scraped by default exclude_transcript=False
  • Set it to 'True' to exclude the transcript

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Data Type
talk_id	Talk identification number provided by TED	int
title	Title of the talk	string
speaker_1	First speaker in TED's speaker list	string
speakers	Speakers in the talk	dictionary
occupations	*Occupations of the speakers	dictionary
about_speakers	*Blurb about each speaker	dictionary
views	Count of views	int
recorded_date	Date the talk was recorded	string
published_date	Date the talk was published to TED.com	string
event	Event or medium in which the talk was given	string
native_lang	Language the talk was given in	string
available_lang	All available languages (lang_code) for a talk	list
comments	Count of comments	int
duration	Duration in seconds	int
topics	Related tags or topics for the talk	list
related_talks	Related talks (key='talk_id', value='title')	dictionary
url	URL of the talk	string
description	Description of the talk	string
transcript	Full transcript of the talk	string

*The dictionary key maps to the speaker in ‘speakers’.

Languages

TED talks have been subtitled in over 100 languages. Here are the top languages:

Code	Language
en	English
es	Spanish
pt-br	Portuguese (Brazilian)
fr	French
it	Italian
zh-cn	Chinese (simplified)
zh-tw	Chinese (traditional)
ko	Korean
ja	Japanese
tr	Turkish
ru	Russian
he	Hebrew

Here is a link to all language codes available as of May 2020.

You can see all the talks for each language at TED – Our Languages.

Meta

Author: Miguel Corral Jr.
Email: corraljrmiguel@gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iMiguel
GitHub: https://github.com/corralm

Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.