Obtaining Twitter Screen Names from a Twitter List

Obtaining twitter screen names from a twitter list

If you want to work with R and twitter, you should take a look at the twitteR package. It doesn't have a function to retrieve the information you want, but we can take advantage of its internal functions to use OAuth, and then send the correct API call. The advantage of using API calls is that you don't rely on parsing the HTML page, you're actually doing what developers are supposed to do.

The code below assumes you have already authenticated using setup_twitter_oauth(), you can find tutorials on this easily, since it's the package basics. Once authenticated, let's load the packages we need:

library(rjson)
library(httr)
# library(twitteR) Should have been loaded already of course

Now to do the API call, we'll use POST. The URL has a slug parameter which is the twitter list name, and a owner_screen_name parameter which is the Twitter Account owner of the list. We'll use internal twitteR:::get_oauth_sig() to authenticate the call.

twlist <- "premier-league-players"
twowner <- "TwitterUK"
api.url <- paste0("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/lists/members.json?slug=",
           twlist, "&owner_screen_name=", twowner, "&count=5000")
response <- POST(api.url, config(token=twitteR:::get_oauth_sig()))
#Count = 5000 is the number of names per result page,
#        which for this case simplifies things to one page.

This returns a JSON response which we can read using fromJSON:

response.list <- fromJSON(content(response, as = "text", encoding = "UTF-8"))

Now, we have a list where each element is the Twitter data of one Twitter-list member. To extract their names and user_names:

users.names <- sapply(response.list$users, function(i) i$name)
users.screennames <- sapply(response.list$users, function(i) i$screen_name)

Which are:

> head(users.names)
[1] "Peter Crouch"         "barry bannan"         "Jose Leonardo Ulloa "
    "Paul McShane"         "nacho monreal"        "James Ward-Prowse"
> head(users.screennames)
[1] "petercrouch"   "bazzabannan25" "Ciclone1923"   "pmacca15"
    "_nachomonreal" "Prowsey16"

Now the best part of this code is that it opens up pretty much the entire twitter API from R, as an already authenticated request. You can check the response list and sublists for all the available information on each query.

How to return a list of Screen Names with TwitteR in R

Hello getScreenName method is to be used on a single tweet like this :

test[[1]]$getScreenName()

For all the screenname you can do like this :

lapply(1:length(test), function(i) test[[i]]$getScreenName())
# or
sapply(test, function(x) x$getScreenName())

Or you can transform test to a data.frame for a more friendly use :

test.df <- do.call("rbind", lapply(test, as.data.frame))

And acces the screenName like this :

test.df$screenName

Twitter how to list screename of people who retweeted a (the same) tweet

1. Get the id of the tweet.
2. Get up to 100 retweets using statuses/retweets documented here https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/post-and-engage/api-reference/get-statuses-retweets-id
3. Each retweet has a user property which contains their screen_name and other info.

twitteR package: how to get users informations from an id's followers list

Instead of using the Id's , I would suggest you to use the screen names of the users

usernames <- nantes_tag$screenName

and then pass character vector of these screen names to lookupUsers and then wrap it around twListToDF to get the required output in dataframe format.

temp_df <- twListToDF(lookupUsers(usernames))

---

Related Topics