harvestPage: Retrieve the posts of a user's G+ page

Description

This function retrieves the most recent posts that a user put on her page. Google calls this `listing activities`.

Usage

harvestPage(user, parseFun = parsePost, results = 1, nextToken = NULL, cr = 1)

Arguments

user

A user identification string: either user ID or +Name.

parseFun

A function for parsing the results, e.g. the supplied parsePost function. If set to NULL, then the raw list of the retrieved posts is being returned. Defaults to parsePost.

results

The approximate number of results that will be retrieved from Google+.

nextToken,cr

used internally to retrieve additional pages of answers from the Google+ API. Users won't need to set these arguments.

Value

The function returns either the raw list of retrieved posts or whatever the supplied parsing function does with the retrieved list.

Details

The result is either a simple list of items from the page that can be parsed using e.g. parsePost or a data frame with that (or another user-supplied) function already applied.

When writing your own parsing functions, make sure that the function takes a single list item from the raw list as its argument and returns a vector of values or a one-row data frame. The return values of the function are then fed into plyr's ldply to turn it into a data frame. See parsePost for an example.

The length of the list or the number of rows of the data frame are somewhat ambiguous. Specifying the results argument will try to get that many results. But there may be less (because Google could not find more) or more (because Google is organizing results on pages and it would be a waste to discard them automatically). If you really depend on getting not more rows than you expected, use standard selection (i.e. [) to trim the results.

Examples

Run this code

## Not run: 
# myPosts.df <- harvestPage("115046504166916768425")
# gPosts.df <- harvestPage("+google", results=200)
# ## End(Not run)