rtweet tutorial

Beginner intro to the R package rtweet for scraping the Twitter API for tweets

RLadies Coventry meetup

• January 26, 2022
• the RLadies meetup description
• the Twitter datasets have been removed on Jan 27, 2022.

The link to my rtweet guide is here which was the learnr file documentation/

Quick rtweet guide

Here are some of the functions for getting started.

Libraries

library(rtweet)
library(tidytext) # text analysis and cleaning
library(ggplot2) # plot your data

Search Twitter

Give your search functions variables, avoid rate limit errors. Maximum amount of tweets is 18,000 in a single API request and returns tweets <= 9 days old.

searched_tweets = search_tweets(
"rstats OR RStats", # the #hashtag or phrase you want to search
n = 4000, # number of tweets to capture
type = "recent", # recent | mixed | popular
include_rts = FALSE, # no retweets
verbose = TRUE,
retryonratelimit = FALSE, # set to true if you want it to run again
lang = "en" # English language tweets
)

Save your Tweets

Saving your Tweets keeps you safe from rate limit errors.

save_as_csv( searched_tweets, # the name of your Twitter dataframe
file_name = "new_twitter_df_name",
prepend_ids = TRUE,
na = " ",
fileEncoding = "UTF-8"
)

Read in your Twitter dataframe

twitter_df = read_twitter_csv(file = "<path>", unflatten= FALSE)