README.md

tScrape

A simple Python scraper and parser for Twitter pages using Beautifulsoup 4 and Selenium webdriver. Parser output is json, see details below.

Install requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configure scraper

In run.py:

1. Define a list of Twitter handles
2. Set a date for the scraper to go back in time
3. Define verbosity and output paths

Run the scraper

python run.py

Output

For each Twitter handle the parser will output two json files:

handle-stats.json with the keys:

• name
• url
• bioText
• following
• frequency: tweets per day
• followers
• location:
• favorites: average received favorites per tweet
• tweets: total number of tweets
• joinDate
• retweets: average received retweets per tweet

handle-tweets.json with an entry for each tweet containing the keys:

• origin: tweet (T) or retweet (RT)?
• text: full text including hashtags, mentions and links
• hashtags: a list of used hashtags
• retweets: number of received retweets
• favorites: number of received favorites
• time: time of tweet
• mentions: list of @ mentions

Importing results

To import the results as a Python dictionary use the jsonLoad function:

from tScrape import jsonLoad
results = jsonLoad(handle, path)

Use the standard dictionary methods to inspect the content:

results.keys()
results.values()

for key en results.keys():
    print key, results[key]