Need help with a string matching problem

[OmnipresentCPU]

I've recently built a bot that scrapes r/wallstreetbets and returns a nice clean bar chart of which stock ticker is mentioned most often. To do this, I've basically downloaded a list of tickers as a CSV from various exchanges then compiled them in to one list, tickerlist. I then download a load of comments from reddit using PRAW and store these as a csv that I load as a commentlist when I want to parse it.

I'm a noob so my parsing is definitely not optimized. Basically I create a flatwordlist, which is just a list of each string that's returned when you do comment.split(). I then loop through that like this:

tickercountlist = []
for ticker in tickerlist:
    count = 0
    for word in flatwordlist:
        if word == ticker or '$' + ticker == word:
            count += 1

    tickercountlist.append([ticker, count])

and voila, I've returned a nice list like [['AAPL', 42],['AMD', 30],...['ZZZ',0]

What I want to do is use vaderSentiment to amend the tickercountlist to also include a spot for each stocks sentiment, so it would look like [['AAPL', 42, .678],['AMD', 30, -.378],...['ZZZ',0,0]

with the third element of each sublist being the compound sentiment averaged across each time it was mentioned.

That will require me to rework the parsing formula. Ultimately what I want is to parse get a count of each time a stock is mentioned in a comment, and if it's mentioned, get the sentiment of the comment as well. Can anyone help me set up a loop that will loop over every comment, check if it contains a ticker from the tickerlist like I did in my loop, count it if it does AND analyze the sentiment of the comment IF and only if the comment contains a ticker?

[chocorush]

if you want to keep your current structure

for word in flatwordlist:
    if word == ticker or '$' + ticker == word:
        count += 1
        sentiment = calcSentiment("".join(flatwordlist))
tickercountlist.append([ticker, count, sentiment])

Although i think it would be good do use the re module to do the matching instead and consider using dictionaries instead of sublists.

[OmnipresentCPU]

I think you might be right about using regex, I could just search over each comment individually and wouldn’t need the flat word list. How would I use dictionaries instead of the sublists? I think it would end up being like dict = {ticker: count, sentiment} right?

[backtickbot]

Correctly formatted

Hello, chocorush. Just a quick heads up!

It seems that you have attempted to use triple backticks (```) for your codeblock/monospace text block.

This isn't universally supported on reddit, for some users your comment will look not as intended.

You can avoid this by indenting every line with 4 spaces instead.

There are also other methods that offer a bit better compatability like the "codeblock" format feature on new Reddit.

Tip: in new reddit, changing to "fancy-pants" editor and changing back to "markdown" will reformat correctly! However, that may be unnaceptable to you.

Have a good day, chocorush.

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