Skip to content
alkihis edited this page Feb 2, 2020 · 14 revisions

twitter-archive-reader

Read data from classic Twitter archive and GDPR archive

This module helps to read data from Twitter archives.

Introduction

Different kinds of archives

It is important to know that Twitter has known different kind of archives.

Initially, archives contains only tweets, with a simple HTML tweet viewer. Archives were quite light. Here, this kind of archive is named "Classic Archive"

In 2018, Twitter introduce a new way to get your data: the "GDPR Archive" (named like this because they've been developed to fulfill the new european law (data protection)). These archives contains a lot more: tweets, indeed, but also favorites, blocks, mutes, direct messages, and all the medias you've posted to Twitter. There isn't any viewer in those archives, so their exploration could be tough.

About how the archives are treated in this module

This module is developed in mind to treat classic and GDPR archives the same way.

Tweets registered in GDPR archive are not well-formed: sometimes, long tweets (140+ characters) are truncated (without possibility to read a longer version) and retweet data is not present.

Unobtainable data will be inferred from patterns (like tweets beginning with RT @... for retweets) in order to convert them in a classic format.

Quoted tweet data are, for both types of archives, inexistant.

This module use BigInt, so at least Node 10.4 or a BigInt compatible browser is recommended.

Module will use a fallback to big-integer npm module if BigInt does not exists. Please note that, for performance reasons, a BigInt compatible system is hugely recommended.