The best way to download all the posts to a topic via the api is to mimic what Discourse is doing in the web browser so please checkout How to reverse engineer the Discourse API for details. Basically go the the topic in the browser open up your dev tools and look at the xhr requests as you scroll through the topic.
Here are the steps to download all the posts in the topic via the api:
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Hit
/t/-/{id}.json. This will contain a ‘posts_stream’ hash that contains a ‘posts’ array and a ‘stream’ array. The ‘posts’ array will give you the first 20 posts. -
Now you need to loop through the ‘stream’ array which gives you all of the post ids in the topic. Remove the first 20 post ids from the stream (otherwise you are re-downloading them for no reason).
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In chunks of 20 pass in all the post_ids to
/t/{id}/posts.jsonlike this:
http://localhost:3000/t/8/posts.json?post_ids[]=46&post_ids[]=47&post_ids[]=48&post_ids[]=49&post_ids[]=50&post_ids[]=51&post_ids[]=52&post_ids[]=53&post_ids[]=54&post_ids[]=55&post_ids[]=56&post_ids[]=57&post_ids[]=58&post_ids[]=59&post_ids[]=60&post_ids[]=61&post_ids[]=62&post_ids[]=63&post_ids[]=64&post_ids[]=65