Twitter Scraper

A simple Python based Twitter Scraper with the ability of scraping tweets either by username or by a search query (Supports other search params as well). This program supports STOP / RESUME operation as it keeps a log of all the previous position id's. This project was created inorder to bypass twitter's 7 day policy since it doesn't allow to fetch tweets which are more than 7 days old as I needed some data for my research project.

Please Note: This is not an alternative for the official API's provided by the twitter

This project is intented for students, researchers & all those who abide by twitter's data terms and conditions.

Contents

1. scraper.py
2. searchParams.py
3. tweets.py
4. main.py
5. requirements.txt

Usage

1. Scraper.py contains all the essential code required to grab tweets and store in the csv file
2. searchParams.py is a class for initializing seach parameters
3. tweets.py is a class whose object for each tweet
4. main.py - The main class required for calling all the above code. This file takes multiple arguments and is responsible for initializing all other files. HELP python main.py --help

Prerequisites & Installation Instructions

This Project is intented to be used with Python 3.x but feel free to convert it inorder to use it for Python 2.x. A requirements.txt file is provided with the project, which contains all the essential packages to run this project.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the code

Use main.py to run the code For help: -> python main.py --help

Example: Search for github keyword between 2018-06-15 to 2018-06-20 and save it to test.csv with log file as test.log.

python main.py --searchquery github --since 2018-06-15 --until 2018-06-20 --op test.csv --log test.log

Output

The output of the scraper is saved in the output file provided in the parameters. By default the outpfile file is op.csv. The program also keeps a log of all the previous search positions, and writes it to the logger file provided in the params. By default, the log file is def_log.log. This file is required inorder to resume the scraping operation if interrupted in between.

Note: If you want to RESUME your previous incomplete scrape operation, make sure to provide the same log file as you did in the first instance.

Feedback & Final Thoughts

Again, this project is intended for Education use. Feel free to use it. You may face cookies problem wherein running your code for the first time will work perfectly fine, but every other time it will fail. So, inorder to fix this, try to use PROXY. --proxy parameter can be used to pass proxy ip and port. E.G: 0.0.0.0:80 There are lots of free proxy sites out there that you can use.

The code may not be very optimized, so if you tend to find any bug fixes, feature requests, pull requests, feedback, etc., are welcome... If you like this project, please do give it a star.