Getting Started

Getting Twitter Access Token

Before you can send requests to the Twitter API you will need to create an application and generate credentials. Credentials are composed of Consumer key, Access Token and Access Token Secret.

You can find more information on how to create an application here

Creating an Environment Variable

Once you have your credentials you will need to create two environment variables referencing your API Key and your API Secret Key. This is important as it 1) keep those two keys private and unexposed to whomever you will share your code with and 2) allows you to send requests to the Twitter API.

On Mac

Open your terminal and enter the following command

nano .bash_profile

Once your .bash_profile is open, create two environment variables by entering the following text. Make sure you do not include spaces between the “=” and your variable name and values.

export TWITTER_CLIENT_KEY="your_api_key"
export TWITTER_CLIENT_SECRET="your_api_secret_key"

On Windows

Current version has not been tested on Windows.

Creating an API Object

The first step is to create an API() object that will handle the connection to the Twitter API.

api = twitterSentiment.API()

Searching Tweets

Once you have instantiated an API() object you will be able to search for tweets by using the searchQuery() method.

tweet = api.searchQuery('Twitter', geocode=None,lang='en',result_type='recent' ,count=1, until=None, since_id=None, max_id=None, include_entities=False, tweet_mode="extended", return_json=True)

print(tweet)

>> {'statuses': [{'created_at': 'Thu Sep 06 19:38:16 +0000 2018', 'id': 1037787081936973824, 'id_str': '1037787081936973824', 'full_text': ....

searchQuery() returns a dictionary with 1 key and 1 value. The value of the dictionary is a list with one dictionary per count of tweets returned.

Getting Structured Data

Once you have your tweet(s), you can create an object StructureStatusesData() to get the data in a structured way. StructureStatusesData() takes one argument, which is the value returned by the searchQquery() method. 4 methods can be used with StructureStatusesData():

• getData()
• getTweet()
• getUser()
• getUserMentioned()

data = twitterSentiment.StructureStatusesData(tweet)
structured_tweets = data.getTweet()
print(data.getData())

>> ([{id': 856800998, 'name': 'Someone', 'screen_name': 'some_one', ....}])

The getData() method is the most general one. It returns a tuple of length 3 composed of list, each holding tweets, user, and user mentions data. Each list contains a dictionary per count of tweets defined in the searchQuery() method

Getting Sentiment Classification Ratio

With your tweets structured into a list, you can use the getTweet() class method to easily get the ratio of positively classified tweets in your returned values.

sentiment = twitterSentiment.SentimentScore(structured_tweets)
print(sentiment.getSentimentClassification())

>> 0.6666