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What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets

What you need to automatically scrape millions of tweets Header image

Are you looking for an easy and powerful way to collect MASSIVE amounts of tweets for your research and build a nice GUI for them? You can easily collect thousands or even millions of tweets by combining snscrape, tweepy, and Python4Delphi library, inside Delphi and C++Builder.

This post will guide you on how to run the snscrape and tweepy library and use Python for Windows app development so you can display it in a really nice Windows GUI app.

How do I retrieve Twitter data using Python snscrape?

snscrape is a library that allows anyone to scrape social networking services (SNS) without requiring personal API keys. It can return thousands of user profiles, hashtags, contents, or searches in seconds and has powerful and highly customizable tools.

The following services are currently supported:

  • Facebook: User profiles, groups, and communities (aka visitor posts)
  • Instagram: User profiles, hashtags, and locations
  • Reddit: Users, subreddits, and searches (via Pushshift)
  • Telegram: Channels
  • Twitter: Users, user profiles, hashtags, searches, threads, and list posts
  • VKontakte: User profiles
  • Weibo (Sina Weibo): User profiles

In this tutorial, we will only focus on using Python Snscrape for Twitter.

How can I get the Snscrape library?

Here is how you can get Snscrape:

Next, run the following command in cmd to get all tweets by Embarcadero Technologies (@EmbarcaderoTech):

What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets The results of scraping in the command line window

Where are the screen-scraping results stored?

These scraping results would be stored in the [email protected] file:

What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets Results of automatically scraping a twitter account

 

How do I retrieve Twitter data using Python Tweepy inside my app?

 

What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets The tweepy logo

Here’s how to retrieve Twitter data using Python Tweepy inside your apps: use Tweepy.

Tweepy is an easy-to-use Python library for accessing the Twitter API.

There are limitations in using Tweepy for scraping tweets. The standard API only allows you to retrieve tweets up to 7 days ago and is limited to scraping 18,000 tweets per 15-minute window. But, combining Tweepy with Snscrape, can enable you to bypass the API limitations, make it possible for you to scrape all the tweets you want, as long as their URLs are already scraped and stored in .txt files, as shown in the previous section! 

To get started with Tweepy, you’ll need to do the following things:

  1. Set up a Twitter account if you don’t have one already.
  2. Using your Twitter account, you will need to apply for Developer Access and then create an application that will generate the API credentials that you will use to access Twitter from Python.
  3. Install and import the Tweepy package.

Once you’ve done these things, you are ready to begin querying Twitter’s API to see what you can learn about tweets!

Is there a step-by-step example of scraping Twitter Tweets?

Yes, here are the step-by-step instructions on how to scrape tweets in your own programs.

First, open and run the Python GUI using project Demo1 from Python4Delphi with RAD Studio. Then, insert the script into the lower Memo, click the Execute button, and get the result in the upper Memo. You can find the Demo1 source on GitHub. The behind the scene details of how Delphi manages to run your Python code in this amazing Python GUI can be found at this link.

What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets Screenshot of the demo tweet scraping project in action
Open Demo01dproj

How do I install tweepy?

The next step is installing tweepy into your system. To install tweepy on your system run this pip command:

The following is a code to use Tweepy to retrieve all @EmbarcaderoTech tweets as listed in the previous section (run this inside the lower Memo of Python4Delphi Demo01 GUI):

What does a demo app of automatically scraping tweets look like?

Using Python and Tweepy for powerful Twitter scraping we get the following demo results:

What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets Result of the full tweet scraping demo
<strong>Tweepy<strong> Demo with Python4Delphi in Windows

How can I automatically download and store Twitter tweets into a file?

We successfully scrape all @EmbarcaderoTech tweets, from 2009 until current tweets, and we store it in the “embarcaderoTech_Tweets.csv” file

What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets Screenshot of how to download tweets into a spreadsheet for analysis
What You Need To Automatically Scrape Millions Of Tweets Another screenshot of how to download tweets into a spreadsheet for analysis

Amazing isn’t it? There is a lot of data that you can retrieve easily.

The best part of using snscrape + tweepy + Python4Delphi, you can retrieve all the tweets that you need without worrying about the API limits!

Where can I find a full source code example of automatically scraping tweets from Twitter?

Here is the full source code on scraping tweets using snscrape https://github.com/checkdigits/pythongui_org_snscrape_example

Here is the full source code on scraping tweets using tweepy: https://github.com/checkdigits/pythongui_org_tweepy_example

Congratulations, now you have learned how to run the snscrape and tweepy library using Python for Delphi to display it in the Delphi Windows GUI app! Now you can collect massive amounts of text data for further analysis such as Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, or other NLP tasks using the framework created by snscrape + tweepy + Python4Delphi.

Where can I find out more on how to automatically scrape tweets from Twitter?

You can find out more by checking out the snscrape library https://pypi.org/project/snscrape/ and tweepy library for Python https://pypi.org/project/tweepy/, and use it in your projects.

Also, check out Python4Delphi which easily allows you to build Python GUIs for Windows using Delphi: https://github.com/pyscripter/python4delphi

 

Where can I find more examples of building GUI for Web Scraping, Data Mining, or working with any textual data?

You can more about data mining web pages and data in this post:

We also have more on the subject of automatically scraping web pages here:

How can I automatically download Instagram posts?

You can use Instaloader to scrape Instgram posts, here’s how:

How can I automatically parse RSS feeds in my own apps?

You can use feedparser to automatically parse RSS feeds such as blog posts and similar types of automatic web feed. The following blog post tells you how:

What other ways are there to carry out automated web scraping or data collection in my apps?

Here are 6 different ways to do things like scrape web page text, data and similar information: 

How can I use natural language processing in my apps?

You can easily perform natural language processing – in fact it’s really not too difficult at all. Here’s our step-by-step instructions on five different ways to use natural language processing (NLP) in your own apps with almost no effort at all.

How can I automatically generate dummy test data and text for my apps?

Sometimes you want to do the opposite of collecting data – you want to generate dummy data and text so that you can test your programs are working correctly. Here are six ways to generate test data for use in your own apps:

Try these examples now by downloading a free demo copy of Delphi!

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