A Python way to collect MORE Tweets and their REPLIES from Twitter than the official API. Currently only Python 2.7.x is supported.

The motivation is to collect tweets for Text Mining or NLP tasks, such as message understanding, talking bot, opinion Mining, information extraction, event detection & tracking, tweet ranking, and so on.

Therefore, not only the tweet text and basic attributes, but also conversations, emojis, links, mentions, hashtags are all necessary to be able to collected by it.

Also, official API imposes limits on time and amount of the tweets you can collect, try TwEater!

Look into the eater.py, it's a simple example of using this bot. First, you need place your order either by a configuration file, or by K=V parameters:

TwOrder.order('order.conf')

Or

TwOrder.order(user='BarackObama')

Two methods digest_2_file and digest_2_mongo are provided to process data after collecting them, either store them in a file or in a MongoDB, or even process them on the fly, it's up to you. You can define your own processing function.

Then, go harvest tweets together with replies (emojis are also collected, very important for sentiment analysis):

TwEater.eatTweets(digest_2_file, 'test')

If you just want get the replies of someone's username some tweet tweet_id, this will return a json array.

print TwChef.shopComments('BarackObama', '876456804305252353')

The example values for the 9 parameters is as follows, which can be seen from file order.conf:

    {
      "user": "",
      "query": "calorie OR eat",
      "since": "2017-06-10",
      "until": "2017-07-19",
      "max_tweets": 10,
      "max_comments": 0,
      "bufferlength": 100,
      "near": "Montréal, Québec",
      "within": "5km",
      "lang": "en"
    }

user and query, at least one of them must be specified.

• user: specifies which user you want collect, default ""
• query: either a keyword or a hashtag you care about, default ""
• since: the start time of the tweets you want, default ""
• until: the end time of the tweets you want, default ""
• max_tweets: how many tweets you want collect for this query and/or user, default 1
• max_comment: how many replies you want for each tweet if there is any, default 1
• bufferlength: process and clear the data in a reasonably sized batch before you run out of memory, default 100
• near: a location where the tweets are posted do you need, default "".
• within: has to be used together with near, specifying the radius of the location, default "".
• lang: specify the language of the tweets you need, only English and French are suppored at the moment, default "en".

For the benefits of learners or researchers, don't abuse it! Have fun!