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README
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This document contains the instructions for various Twitter-related scripts contained in the Twitter-collector repo.

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License
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Unless otherwise specified, all CaSM Lab code, including everything in this repository, is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license with the following boilerplate message:

   Copyright 2011 Illinois Institute of Technology – Libby Hemphill (libby.hemphill@iit.edu)

   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.

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Instructions
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-- constants_example.rb --
Most of the code in this repo requires your Twitter credentials. Save constants_example.rb as constants.rb and update all the entries with your credentials.

To get OAuth credentials, you must register your application with Twitter. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth#register for details.

-- get_user_ids.rb --
A short script that accepts an array of Twitter screen_names and returns a list of names and their matching Twitter user_ids as a CSV file. The Streaming API requires user_id for most functions that allow you to collect data by user, and this is the fastest way to get a list of user_ids for users you want to follow, aggregate, etc.

Dependencies:
rubygems
twitter4r
twitter

Setup:
Make sure constants.rb contains your Twitter OAuth credentials.
Put all the screen_names you want to lookup in a plain text file, one screen_name per line.

Usage:

ruby get_user_ids.rb input_file output_file

where input_file and output_file are full paths to the list of screen_names and the CSV file you want the script to create with screen_names and ids.

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To Do
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1. Allow batch lookup in get_users_ids.rb (Twitter will allow you to look up 20 at a time.)