The format of the message obtained by Slack API is subtly difficult to use

I got the message by hitting the API, but I want to get at least

--User ID

• Times of Day --Text

Of these, I couldn't get the user ID, so I tried trial and error. The story described here is originally located on GitHub.

️ Requirements

Even if you do some kind of analysis material, it seems that you can not talk without at least the following three pieces of information.

• Times of Day --Username (ID) --POST text

The requirement this time is to extract these three pieces of information from all posts (of a specific channel).

Conclusion

As a result of trial and error, I concluded that the following feelings would be good.

For time and text,

data = json.load(open("posts.json"))
for msg in data:
	print msg.get("ts", "")
	print msg.get("text", "")

It's OK with a feeling like.

Regarding user acquisition, those that cannot be acquired under the following conditions are through.

def get_user_id(m):
    if m.has_key("user"): return m["user"]
    if m.has_key("bot_id"): return m["bot_id"]
    return None

for msg in data:
	uid = get_user_id(msg)
	if uid is None:
		continue
	# do something ...

Under the verification conditions, the number of posts corresponding to this was 0.2 [%] of the total, so we conclude that it can be ignored.

Verification conditions

Data comes from your company's random channel. I will refrain from disclosing the specific period and the number of posts, but I looked at the messages posted in a period of about one and a half years.

that's all.