Get Twitter Feed as JSON without authentication

Question

I wrote a small JavaScript a couple of years ago that grabbed a users (mine) most recent tweet and then parsed it out for display including links, date etc.

It used this

Answer 1

You can use the twitter api v1 to take the tweets without using OAuth. For example: this link turns @jack's last 100 tweets.

The timeline documentation is here.

Answer 2

You can access and scrape Twitter via advanced search without being logged in:

• https://twitter.com/search-advanced

GET request

When performing a basic search request you get:

https://twitter.com/search?q=Babylon%205&src=typd

• q (our query encoded)
• src (assumed to be the source of the query, i.e. typed)

by default, Twitter returns top 25 results, but if you click on all you can get the realtime tweets:

https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=Babylon%205&src=typd

JSON contents

More Tweets are loaded on the page via AJAX:

https://twitter.com/i/search/timeline?f=realtime&q=Babylon%205&src=typd&include_available_features=1&include_entities=1&last_note_ts=85&max_position=TWEET-553069642609344512-553159310448918528-BD1UO2FFu9QAAAAAAAAETAAAAAcAAAASAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Use max_position to request the next tweets

The following json array returns all you need to scrape the contents:

https://twitter.com/i/search/timeline?f=realtime&q=Babylon%205&src=typd

• has_more_items (bool)
• items_html (html)
• max_position (key)
• refresh_cursor (key)

DOM elements

Here comes a list of DOM elements you can use to extract

The authors twitter handle

div.original-tweet[data-tweet-id]   

The name of the author

div.original-tweet[data-name]

The user ID of the author

div.original-tweet[data-user-id]    

Timestamp of the post

span._timestamp[data-time]  

Timestamp of the post in ms

span._timestamp[data-time-ms]

Text of Tweet

p.tweet-text
 

Number of Retweets

span.ProfileTweet-action–retweet > span.ProfileTweet-actionCount[data-tweet-stat-count] 

Number of Favo

span.ProfileTweet-action–favorite > span.ProfileTweet-actionCount[data-tweet-stat-count]    

Resources

• https://code.recuweb.com/2015/scraping-tweets-directly-from-twitter-without-authentication/

Answer 3

As you can see in the documentation, using the REST API you'll need OAuth Tokens in order to do this. Luckily, we can use the Search (which doesn't use OAuth) and use the from:[USERNAME] operator

Example: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from:marcofolio
Will give you a JSON object with tweets from that user, where

object.results[0]

will give you the last tweet.

Answer 4

You can use a Twitter API wrapper, such as TweetJS.com which offers a limited set of the Twitter API's functionality, but does not require authentication. It's called like this;

TweetJs.ListTweetsOnUserTimeline("PetrucciMusic",
function (data) {
    console.log(data);
});

Answer 5

The method "GET statuses/user_timeline" need a user Authentification like you can see on the official documentation :

You can use the search method "GET search" wich not require authentification.

You have a code for starting here : http://jsfiddle.net/73L4c/6/

function searchTwitter(query) {
    $.ajax({
        url: 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?' + jQuery.param(query),
        dataType: 'jsonp',
        success: function(data) {
            var tweets = $('#tweets');
            tweets.html('');
            for (res in data['results']) {
                tweets.append('<div>' + data['results'][res]['from_user'] + ' wrote: <p>' + data['results'][res]['text'] + '</p></div><br />');
            }
        }
    });
}

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#submit').click(function() {
        var params = {
            q: $('#query').val(),
            rpp: 5
        };
        // alert(jQuery.param(params));
        searchTwitter(params);
    });
})

Answer 6

Here is a quick hack (really a hack, should be used with caution as its not future proof) which uses http://anyorigin.com to scrape twitter site for the latest tweets.

http://codepen.io/JonOlick/pen/XJaXBd

It works by using anyorigin (you have to pay to use it) to grab the HTML. It then parses the HTML using jquery to extract out the relevant tweets.

Tweets on the mobile site use a div with the class .tweet-text, so this is pretty painless.

The relevant code looks like this:

$.getJSON('http://anyorigin.com/get?url=mobile.twitter.com/JonOlick&callback=?', function(data){

  // Remap ... utf8 encoding to ascii. 
  var bar = data.contents;
  bar = bar.replace(/…/g, '...');

  var el = $( '<div></div>' );
  el.html(bar);

  // Change all links to point back at twitter
  $('.twitter-atreply', el).each(function(i){
    $(this).attr('href', "https://twitter.com" + $(this).attr('href'))
  });

  // For all tweets
  $('.tweet-text', el).each(function(i){
    // We only care about the first 4 tweets
    if(i < 4) {
      var foo = $(this).html();
      $('#test').html($('#test').html() + "<div class=ProfileTweet><div class=ProfileTweet-contents>" + foo + "</div></div><br>");
    }
  });

});