readTweets function

Converts tweets in JSON format to R list.

This function parses tweets downloaded using filterStream, sampleStream or userStream and returns a list.

readTweets(tweets, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

• tweets: A character string naming the file where tweets are stored or the name of the object in memory where the tweets were saved as strings.
• verbose: logical, default is TRUE, which will print in the console the number of tweets that have been parsed.

Details

This function is the first step in the parseTweets function and is provided now as an independent function for convenience purposes. In cases where only one field is needed, it can be faster to extract it directly from the JSON data read in R as a list. It can also be useful to extract fields that are not parsed by parseTweets, such as hashtags or mentions.

The total number of tweets that are parsed might be lower than the number of lines in the file or object that contains the tweets because blank lines, deletion notices, and incomplete tweets are ignored.

Examples

## The dataset example_tweets contains 10 public statuses published
## by @twitterapi in plain text format. The code below converts the object
## into a list and extracts only the text.

data(example_tweets)
tweets.list <- readTweets(example_tweets)
only.text <- unlist(lapply(tweets.list, '[[', 'text'))
## it can be done with an explicit loop:
only.text <- c()
for (i in 1:length(tweets.list)){
   only.text[i] <- tweets.list[[i]]['text']
}
print(unlist(only.text))

See Also

parseTweets.

Author(s)

Pablo Barbera pablo.barbera@nyu.edu