Stack Overflow & Stack Exchange Q&A Scraper — Questions & Answers API

Scrape questions and answers from Stack Overflow — or any Stack Exchange site — into clean, structured data. This scraper uses the official Stack Exchange API to pull questions (with full body, tags, scores, and metadata) and, optionally, their answers — so you get ready-to-use Q&A pairs for LLM/RAG datasets, developer research, or trend analysis. HTML is stripped to clean text.

Works across the whole Stack Exchange network: stackoverflow, superuser, serverfault, askubuntu, math.stackexchange, datascience, and hundreds more.

What it does

• Any SE site — set site to scrape Stack Overflow or any Stack Exchange community.
• Search or browse — free-text query, tag filters, and sort by votes / activity / newest / relevance.
• Q&A pairs — enable includeAnswers to attach each question's answers (with accepted-answer flag) — ideal for fine-tuning and RAG.
• Clean text — question and answer bodies are converted from HTML to plain text.
• Official API — reliable, respectful, and rate-limit-aware (optional Stack Apps key raises the daily quota).

Use cases

• Build LLM/RAG datasets of high-quality technical Q&A.
• Developer research — find top questions/answers for a tag or topic.
• Trend analysis — track what a community is asking over time.
• Content & docs — surface common problems and canonical solutions.

Input

Field	Description
site	Stack Exchange site slug (default stackoverflow).
query	Free-text search (empty = top/newest questions).
tags	Only questions tagged with ALL of these.
sort	votes, activity, creation, or relevance (search only).
includeAnswers	Also fetch each question's answers (Q&A pairs).
maxItems	Cap on questions returned (main cost lever).
apiKey	Optional Stack Apps key — raises daily quota 300 → 10,000.

Output

Each question becomes one dataset item:

{
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "questionId": 231767,
  "title": "What does the \"yield\" keyword do in Python?",
  "body": "What functionality does the yield keyword provide? ...",
  "tags": ["python", "iterator", "generator", "yield"],
  "score": 13135,
  "viewCount": 3200000,
  "answerCount": 51,
  "isAnswered": true,
  "acceptedAnswerId": 231855,
  "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/231767/...",
  "author": "Alex. S.",
  "creationDate": "2008-10-23T22:21:11Z",
  "answers": [
    { "answerId": 231855, "score": 18315, "isAccepted": true,
      "body": "To understand what yield does, you must understand generators...",
      "author": "Sean Vieira", "creationDate": "2008-10-23T22:48:44Z" }
  ]
}

answers is present only when includeAnswers is on.

Pricing

Pay-per-result: you're charged per question returned (answers are included in the question record).

Notes

• Uses the official Stack Exchange API v2.3. Keyless runs share a 300 requests/day quota; add a free Stack Apps apiKey to raise it to 10,000/day for large jobs.
• Respects the API's backoff throttling automatically.

FAQ

Which sites work? Any Stack Exchange site — just set its slug (e.g. math.stackexchange).

Can I get answers, not just questions? Yes — enable includeAnswers.

What formats can I export? JSON, JSONL, CSV, or Excel, or via the Apify API.