TL;DR

We finally download a whole thread of tweets using the Twitter API, yay!

We have discussed a lot about getting Twitter threads lately:

• Scrape a Thread of Tweets shows a poor man’s way of doing this by scraping data from a page generated by an online service to unroll threads;

• Getting started with MojoX::Twitter introduced us to MojoX::Twitter, a handy module to consume the Twitter API;

• last, Tweets from a user paved the way to getting a thread by coding a way to get all tweets since a specific one.

In particular, we’re leveraging the code from the last post here!

Filtering tweets in a thread

The following function filters an input anonymous array (such the one returned by get_tweets_since) of tweets to select only those belonging to a thread:

 1 sub filter_thread ($tweets) {
 2    my @thread = ($tweets->[0]);
 3    my %in_thread = ($thread[0]{id} => 1);
 4    for my $tweet ($tweets->@*) {
 5       defined(my $rid = $tweet->{in_reply_to_status_id}) or next;
 6       $in_thread{$rid} or next;
 7       push @thread, $tweet;
 8       $in_thread{$tweet->{id}} = 1;
 9    } ## end for my $tweet ($tweets->...)
10    return \@thread;
11 } ## end sub filter_thread

The thread is assumed to begin at the first tweet in the array, which is consistent with get_tweets_since that we introduced in Tweets from a user. Hence, the first tweet is both collected in array @thread (which is later returned in line 10, as an array reference) and tracked as being %in_thread.

Input tweets are iterated to find interesting ones, depending on two conditions (lines 5 and 6):

• they MUST have a defined in_reply_to_status_id, because follow-ups in a thread are always referred to some previous tweet, and
• the in_reply_to_status_id MUST be part of the current thread.

If this is the case, the tweet is put in the @thread and its identifier is flagged as being %in_thread, for getting possible follow-ups later.

The complete program

See the local version if the above snippet from GitLab is not available.

Wrap-up for now

Did you enjoy this tour-de-force about getting a thread of tweets? Do you have comments? By all means use the machinery below!