# An Importer for Google Groups

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/an-importer-for-google-groups/45624>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [Juin 13, 2016, 11:20 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/an-importer-for-google-groups/45624 "2016-06-13T23:20:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![steinwaywhw](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/steinwaywhw/32/121566_2.png) [@steinwaywhw](https://meta.discourse.org/u/steinwaywhw)\
**Post date:** [Juin 13, 2016, 11:20 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/an-importer-for-google-groups/45624/1 "2016-06-13T23:20:33Z")

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Hi,

I would like to open a new thread to continue the discussion [here](https://meta.discourse.org/t/import-from-google-groups-to-discourse/) about an importer for Google Groups. In short, I have a simple python scripts based on Scrapy that scraps all messages of a group to a JSON file. I hope someone who knows Ruby and Discourse API could make it into a real importer (json-discourse importer).

That prior discussion mentioned an importer too. But it seems to me that it can not scroll down to the bottom of a page to load complete messages. It sounds like that one doesn’t really work. I report here that my script can follow links like “more topics” until there is no more, thus scraping all messages.

Another trick is that I found the Google Group url has the format of `base_forum_url`+`range`. Not sure if anyone noticed, but that basically works pretty well for me. For example, you can use

`https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ats-lang-users[10-20]`

to get a range of topics from index 10 to index 20. Therefore you have a way to iterate all topics in a group.

Anyway, I would like to share my scripts as a starting point. I hope someone who has experience with Discourse can pick it up and make it one-click to import Google Groups to Discourse.

The Github Repo is here: [GitHub - steinwaywhw/google-group-exporter · GitHub](https://github.com/steinwaywhw/google-group-exporter)  
There is a python script, depends on [scrapy.org](http://scrapy.org) `<-` it should be a clickable link, but I’m a new user, I can’ put more than two links in a post …  
There is an example Google Group topic page as seen by the scraper  
There is an example output from my scripts.

BTW, “New users can only have two links in a post” - why is that? it’s annoying.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/an-importer-for-google-groups/45624)._