Quickstart guide

This file will show you how to use StackSearch to search StackOverflow

Installation

Warning

To install StackSearch, you must have python version 3.6 or higher.

You can easily install stacksearch via pip:

pip install stacksearch

or

python -m install stacksearch

Whatever you prefer.

Basic CLI Tasks

stacksearch is designed so that anyone can use it, with ease.

To refer to the commands stacksearch provides (or the help menu), you can type stacksearch --help or stacksearch -h.

To search StackOverflow directly from the command-line, do stacksearch "this is your query" or python -m stacksearch "this is your query" and replace "this is your query" with the query string you want to search for.

Options

You can also provide additional options to stacksearch.

For example, say you want to search all of the StackExchange you know, then you would run stacksearch this is your query --sites ... (replace ‘…’ with the sites you want to search)

Or maybe you just don’t want so much debug information filling up your terminal, then you can pass the –silent option. Which could also be shortened to -s.

Warning

DO NOT CONFUSE THE -s OPTION WITH THE --sites OPTION! THEY ARE NOT THE SAME!!

Or maybe you want JSON output that you can use in other programs. Then you can pass the --json option, the -j option, the --raw-data option, the --raw option, or the -r option instead.

It’ll output raw JSON data instead of beautifully formatted (and elegantly colorized) question-and-answers.

Simple API

See also

The API Reference

An example of how to StackSearch’s API to search for any StackExchange site is:

from stacksearch import sync_search
print(sync_search("How do i code python"))

And then, from just 2 lines of code, you can effectively search for answers on StackOverflow using the simple stacksearch API.

Why is it called :func:`stacksearch.sync_search`?

Well, that’s because it’s actually a wrapper around the asynchronous API.

If you want to search for multiple questions asynchronously, you can use write:

from stacksearch import search
import asyncio
async def main():
    stuff = []
    stuff.append(await search('How do i code python'))
    stuff.append(await search('How do make my own object'))
    stuff.append(await search('What are objects'))
    stuff.append(await search('[python] lists'))
    return stuff
print(asyncio.run(main))

If you want to.