JuliaTwitter

Lawrence Technological University

An easy way to interact with Twitter through Julia.

Features

• Easy streaming interface that can be used within Julia or as a separate program
• Modular database handling: Users can allow JuliaTwitter to interact with any database with just a few lines of code (MongoDB and .txt are included as examples)
• Functions for interacting Twitter's REST GET API

##Configuration

In order to connect with twitter, the user must have OAuth credentials. These can be set up in the user_config.jl file or by creating a new TwAuth object.

The user_config.jl file is also where the user must include database files. (See the database section for more details on writing database files)

Standalone

JuliaTwitter streaming can be called from the command line for quick and easy streaming

The following will stream 500 (-n) tweets into the iphone collecion of the tech database in using MongoDB.

~/JuliaTwitter$ julia stream_tweets.jl -dbh "TwMongoDB(\"tech\", \"iphone\")" -q "iPhone" -a 100 -n 500

Options

• -dbh The database handler typed out as it would appear in Julia. (required) (see database section for more details)
• -q The query to search for using Twitter's track parameter (required)
• -n The number of tweets to stream (default = 100000)
• -t The length of time (in minutes) to stream tweets. If both -n and -t are used together, the program will stream until either condition is met. (default = 60)
• -a Will print a message to the console every N tweets (default = 20)

Streaming within Julia

The streaming calls within Julia work very similar to the standalone calls using keyword arguments.

The following is identical to the the call in the standalone section.

options = Dict()
options["track"] = "iPhone"

stream_tweets(TwMongoDB("tech", "iphone"), options; max_tweets = 500, alert_every = 100)

Options

• db The database handler typed out as it would appear in Julia. (required) (see database section for more details)
• options["track"] The query to search for using Twitter's track parameter (required)
• max_tweets The number of tweets to stream (default = 100000)
• max_time The length of time (in minutes) to stream tweets. If both max_tweets and max_time are used together, the program will stream until either condition is met. (default = 60)
• alert_every Will print a message to the console every N tweets (default = 20)

Custom Databases

Implementing a custom database is very easy. In order to do so, we must create a Julia type that is a subtype of TwitterDB. The user msu also implement two mwthods: add_entry(Dict()) and close_db(TwitterDB). Below is an example of a "database" that loads the text of a tweet to a .txt file.

Database files must be placed in the JuliaTwitter/dbhandle folder. They must also be included in the user_config.jl file. (See Configuration section)

#The TwTXTFile type writes the text of a tweet as a new line in a text file
#This type exists more for demonstration purposes and is not intended
#   to be used for large scale data mining
type TwTXTFile <: TwitterDB
  file::IOStream

  #Create a TwTXTFile object given the path of the .txt file
  function TwTXTFile(path::AbstractString)
    #a -> write, create, append
    new(open(path, "a"))
  end

end

#This function takes a dictionary (returned by the streaming API)
#   and writes it to the "database"
function add_entry(t::TwTXTFile, d::Dict{AbstractString, Any})
  #Write the text of the tweet to the file
  write(t.file, d["text"])
  write(t.file, '\n')
end

#This function is called once all of
#   the requested tweets have been written
function close_db(t::TwTXTFile)
  close(t.file)
end