How to convert searchTwitter results (from library(twitteR)) into a data.frame?

Question

I am working on saving twitter search results into a database (SQL Server) and am getting an error when I pull the search results from twitteR.

If I execute:

<

Answer 1

Here is a nice function to convert it into a DF.

TweetFrame<-function(searchTerm, maxTweets)
{
  tweetList<-searchTwitter(searchTerm,n=maxTweets)
  return(do.call("rbind",lapply(tweetList,as.data.frame)))
}

Use it as :

tweets <- TweetFrame(" ", n)

Answer 2

I use this code I found from http://blog.ouseful.info/2011/11/09/getting-started-with-twitter-analysis-in-r/ a while ago:

#get data
tws<-searchTwitter('#keyword',n=10)

#make data frame
df <- do.call("rbind", lapply(tws, as.data.frame))

#write to csv file (or your RODBC code)
write.csv(df,file="twitterList.csv")

Answer 3

Try this:

ldply(searchTwitter("#rstats", n=100), text)

twitteR returns an S4 class, so you need to either use one of its helper functions, or deal directly with its slots. You can see the slots by using unclass(), for instance:

unclass(searchTwitter("#rstats", n=100)[[1]])

These slots can be accessed directly as I do above by using the related functions (from the twitteR help: ?statusSource):

 text Returns the text of the status
 favorited Returns the favorited information for the status
 replyToSN Returns the replyToSN slot for this status
 created Retrieves the creation time of this status
 truncated Returns the truncated information for this status
 replyToSID Returns the replyToSID slot for this status
 id Returns the id of this status
 replyToUID Returns the replyToUID slot for this status
 statusSource Returns the status source for this status

As I mentioned, it's my understanding that you will have to specify each of these fields yourself in the output. Here's an example using two of the fields:

> head(ldply(searchTwitter("#rstats", n=100), 
        function(x) data.frame(text=text(x), favorited=favorited(x))))
                                                                                                                                          text
1                                                     @statalgo how does that actually work? does it share mem between #rstats and postgresql?
2                                   @jaredlander Have you looked at PL/R? You can call #rstats from PostgreSQL: http://www.joeconway.com/plr/.
3   @CMastication I was hoping for a cool way to keep data in a DB and run the normal #rstats off that. Maybe a translator from R to SQL code.
4                     The distribution of online data usage: AT&T has recently announced it will no longer http://goo.gl/fb/eTywd #rstat
5 @jaredlander not that I know of. Closest is sqldf package which allows #rstats and sqlite to share mem so transferring from DB to df is fast
6 @CMastication Can #rstats run on data in a DB?Not loading it in2 a dataframe or running SQL cmds but treating the DB as if it wr a dataframe
  favorited
1     FALSE
2     FALSE
3     FALSE
4     FALSE
5     FALSE
6     FALSE

You could turn this into a function if you intend on doing it frequently.

Answer 4

For those that run into the same problem I did which was getting an error saying

Error in as.double(y) : cannot coerce type 'S4' to vector of type 'double' 

I simply changed the word text in

ldply(searchTwitter("#rstats", n=100), text) 

to statusText, like so:

ldply(searchTwitter("#rstats", n=100), statusText)

Just a friendly heads-up :P

Answer 5

I know this is an old question, but still, here is what I think is a ``modern'' version to solve this. Just use the function twListToDf

gvegayon <- getUser("gvegayon")
timeline <- userTimeline(gvegayon,n=400)
tl <- twListToDF(timeline)

Hope it helps

Answer 6

The twitteR package now includes a function twListToDF that will do this for you.

puppy_table <- twListToDF(puppy)