userStream: Connect to Twitter Streaming API and return messages for a single user.

Description

userStream opens a connection to Twitter's Streaming API that will return statuses specific to the authenticated user. The output can be saved as an object in memory or written to a text file.

Usage

userStream(file.name = NULL, with = "followings",
    replies = NULL, track = NULL, locations = NULL,
    timeout = 0, tweets = NULL, oauth = NULL,
    verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

file.name

string, name of the file where tweets will be written. "" indicates output to the console, which can be redirected to an R object. If the file already exists, tweets will be appended (not overwritten).

with

string, detault is "followings", which will stream messages from accounts the authenticated user follow. If set to "user", will only stream messages from authenticated user.

See the with parameter information in the Streaming API documentation for details: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters#with

replies

string, default is NULL, which will only stream replies sent by a different user if the authenticated user follows the receiver of the reply. All replies to users that the authenticated user follows will be included if this argument is set to "all".

See the replies parameter information in the Streaming API documentation for details: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters#replies

track

string or string vector containing keywords to track. See the track parameter information in the Streaming API documentation for details: http://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters#track.

locations

numeric, a vector of longitude, latitude pairs (with the southwest corner coming first) specifying sets of bounding boxes to filter statuses by. See the locations parameter information in the Streaming API documentation for details: http://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters#locations

timeout

numeric, maximum length of time (in seconds) of connection to stream. The connection will be automatically closed after this period. For example, setting timeout to 10800 will keep the connection open for 3 hours. The default is 0, which will keep the connection open permanently.

tweets

numeric, maximum number of tweets to be collected when function is called. After that number of tweets have been captured, function will stop. If set to NULL (default), the connection will be open for the number of seconds specified in timeout parameter.

oauth

an object of class oauth that contains the access tokens to the user's twitter session. This is the only method for authentication available for user streams. See examples for more details.

verbose

logical, default is TRUE, which generates some output to the R console with information about the capturing process.

Details

This function provides access to messages for a single user.

The set of messages to be returned can include the user's tweets and/or replies, and public statuses published by the accounts the user follows, as well to replies to those accounts.

Tweets can also be filtered by keywords and location, using the track and locations arguments.

The total number of actual tweets that are captured might be lower than the number of tweets requested because blank lines, deletion notices, and incomplete tweets are included in the count of tweets downloaded.

Note that when no file name is provided, tweets are written to a temporary file, which is loaded in memory as a string vector when the connection to the stream is closed.

Examples

Run this code

# NOT RUN {
## The following example shows how to capture a user's home timeline
## with the Streaming API and using authentication via the ROAuth
## package, with fictitious consumerkey and consumer secret.
## You can obtain your own at dev.twitter.com
 library(ROAuth)
 requestURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token"
 accessURL <- "http://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token"
 authURL <- "http://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize"
 consumerKey <- "xxxxxyyyyyzzzzzz"
 consumerSecret <- "xxxxxxyyyyyzzzzzzz111111222222"
 my_oauth <- OAuthFactory$new(consumerKey=consumerKey,
    consumerSecret=consumerSecret, requestURL=requestURL,
    accessURL=accessURL, authURL=authURL)
 my_oauth$handshake(cainfo = system.file("CurlSSL", "cacert.pem", package = "RCurl"))
 save(my_oauth, file="my_oauth")
## Capturing 10 tweets from a user's timeline
 userStream( file.name="my_timeline.json", with="followings",
     tweets=10, oauth=my_oauth )
# }

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