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)