If you’re reading this post, I’m sure you don’t need an introduction on WP CLI.

Inclined to use some stats in my monthly review post, I wanted to find out the total number of spam comments my blog received for the month of April.

Thinking that WP CLI would make my task easier, I started looking at the documentation to find out the appropriate syntax to be used with the wp comment list command.

To my surprise I found out that date query isn’t possible with WP CLI. I realized that I could leverage RESTful WP CLI and apply the date query.

RESTful WP CLI query looks like the following.

wp rest comment list

Using the help command, I figured out the options to be passed.

wp help rest comment list

In order to get the list of spam comments for the month of April, I arrived at the following command.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-03-31T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam'

Problems

However, there were a couple of problems.

• Authorization: In order to use the status option, authorization is must. Otherwise only the default value approve will be taken in to account.
• Readability: The output contains all the comment table fields cluttering the entire console.
• Getting the total count: A tabular display of data doesn’t output the total number of records.

Authorization

I solved the authorization problem using the user option in the command like shown below.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-04-27T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam' --user='admin'

Readability

I solved the readability problem using the field option in the command like shown below.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-04-27T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam' --user='admin' --field='id'

Total Count

You can obtain the count by using the --format=headers option.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-04-27T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam' --user='admin' --field='id' --format='headers'

References

• http://wp-api.org/guides/getting-started.html#before-we-start