Get Old Tweets Programatically

A project written in Java to get old tweets, it bypass some limitations of Twitter Official API.

Details

Twitter Official API has the bother limitation of time constraints, you can't get older tweets than a week. Some tools provide access to older tweets but in the most of them you have to spend some money before. I was searching other tools to do this job but I didn't found it, so after analyze how Twitter Search through browser works I understand its flow. Basically when you enter on Twitter page a scroll loader starts, if you scroll down you start to get more and more tweets, all through calls to a JSON provider. After mimic we get the best advantage of Twitter Search on browsers, it can search the deepest oldest tweets.

Components

• Tweet: Model class to give some informations about a specific tweet.

  • id (String)
  • permalink (String)
  • username (String)
  • text (String)
  • date (Date)
  • retweets (int)
  • favorites (int)
  • mentions (String)
  • hashtags (String)
  • geo (String)

• TweetManager: A manager class to help getting tweets in Tweet's model.

  • getTweets (TwitterCriteria): Return the list of tweets retrieved by using an instance of TwitterCriteria.

• TwitterCriteria: A collection of search parameters to be used together with TweetManager.

  • create: First method to be called, creates a new empty instance.
  • setUsername (String): An optional specific username from a twitter account. Without "@".
  • setSince (String. "yyyy-mm-dd"): A lower bound date to restrict search.
  • setUntil (String. "yyyy-mm-dd"): An upper bound date to restrist search.
  • setQuerySearch (String): A query text to be matched.
  • setMaxTweets (int): The maximum number of tweets to be retrieved. If this number is unsetted or lower than 1 all possible tweets will be retrieved.

• Main: A simple class showing examples of use.

• Exporter: A class to execute tweets search through command-line.

• got.jar: A runnable jar to call Exporter class. The result goes to a generated csv file named "output_got.csv".

Examples of java use

• Get tweets by username

    TwitterCriteria criteria = TwitterCriteria.create()
				.setUsername("barackobama")
				.setMaxTweets(1);
    Tweet t = TweetManager.getTweets(criteria).get(0);
    System.out.println(t.getText());

• Get tweets by query search

    TwitterCriteria criteria = TwitterCriteria.create()
				.setQuerySearch("europe refugees")
				.setMaxTweets(1);
    Tweet t = TweetManager.getTweets(criteria).get(0);
    System.out.println(t.getText());

• Get tweets by username and bound dates

    TwitterCriteria criteria = TwitterCriteria.create()
				.setUsername("barackobama")
				.setSince("2015-09-10")
				.setUntil("2015-09-12")
				.setMaxTweets(1);
    Tweet t = TweetManager.getTweets(criteria).get(0);
    System.out.println(t.getText());

Examples of command-line use

• Get help use

    java -jar got.jar -h

• Get tweets by username

    java -jar got.jar username=barackobama maxtweets=1

• Get tweets by query search

    java -jar got.jar querysearch="europe refugees" maxtweets=1

• Get tweets by username and bound dates

    java -jar got.jar username=barackobama since=2015-09-10 until=2015-09-12 maxtweets=1