Processing Twitter text

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python

Alex Hanna

Computational Social Scientist

Text in Twitter JSON

tweet_json = open('tweet-example.json', 'r').read()
tweet = json.loads(tweet_json)
tweet['text']

More than 140 characters

tweet['extended_tweet']['full_text']

Retweets and quoted tweets

tweet['quoted_status']['extended_tweet']['full_text']

Textual user information

tweet['user']['description']
tweet['user']['location']

Flattening Twitter JSON

extended_tweet['extended_tweet-full_text'] = 
    extended_tweet['extended_tweet']['full_text']

Flattening Twitter JSON

tweet_list = []
with open('all_tweets.json', 'r') as fh:
    tweets_json = fh.read().split("\n")

    for tweet in tweets_json:
        tweet_obj = json.loads(tweet)

        if 'extended_tweet' in tweet_obj:
            tweet_obj['extended_tweet-full_text'] = 
                tweet_obj['extended_tweet']['full_text']     
        ...

    tweet_list.append(tweet)

tweets = pd.DataFrame(tweet_list)

Let's practice!

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python