RegexTweet

RTs via RE's

To use regextweet, simple create an account, register an app, and copy these the keys found on http://dev.twitter.com/apps into a text file named api.txt in the project's root directory, i.e:

consumer_key
consumer_secret
access_token
access_token_secret

With regextweet we can quickly follow a list, filter information of interest, and retweet it. Here's the usage template:

python regextweet.py --u user_name --l list_name --o list_owner --r "regex" --a api.txt --h handles.txt

where:

• --u defines the user name of the retweetbot

• --l defines the name of the list to follow and filter,

• --r is the quoted regular expression to query the text with.

• --o is the user name of the person who owns the list (optional; see below)

• --a is the filepath to the textfile with your api credentials (default = "api.txt")

• --h is the filepath to the textfile with the list of twitter users to follow (optional; regextweet will not bother with this if --o is provided, and will just follow the list --l owned by user --o. If neither--o nor --h are provided, --h defaults to "header.txt" . If this is the case and "header.txt" does not exist, the program will break')

So for YourRepsOnGuns, where we retweeted from the list named "members-of-congress" under CSPAN's account, we simply typed:

python regextweet.py --u yourrepsonguns --l members-of-congress --o cspan --r "(gun)"

However, this only ran the retweet bot once.

To run it on a continual basis, we created a cron job by writing:

crontab -e

And inserting this line of text at the top of our crontab settings.

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/python /home/ec2-user/regextweet.py python regextweet.py --u yourrepsonguns --l members-of-congress --o cspan --r "(gun)"

Here, the five *'s correspond to minutes, hours, days, months, years, respectively. Our setting runs the job every 5 minutes forever.

Make your own tweetbot

If you want to try out regextweet.py simply download the repository, navigate to the extracted folder and customize api.txt and handles.txt according to your preferences. Before running regextweet.py, make sure to run:

sudo pip install tweepy oauth2 requests

which should cover the necessary dependencies.

Now you can create an account called "biebergoestowashington" and retweet every time a representative mentions justin bieber by simply typing:

python regextweet.py --u biebergoestowashington --l members-of-congress --o cspan --r "(bieber)"

TODO

While regextweet.py only works for twitter feeds, the same idea could scale to facebook pages, rss feeds, and even CSPAN by using opened-captions. Help me build something better!