Get Old Tweets Programatically

A project written in Java to get old tweets, it bypass some limitations of Twitter Official API.

Details

Twitter Official API limits the tweet search to a week. Some tools provide access to older tweets but in the most of them you have to spend some money. This tools mimics the tweet search performed on a browser, where there are no time limits.

Components

• Tweet: Model class to give some informations about a specific tweet.

  • id (String)
  • permalink (String)
  • username (String)
  • text (String)
  • date (Date)
  • retweets (int)
  • favorites (int)
  • mentions (String)
  • hashtags (String)
  • geo (String)

• TweetManager: A manager class to help getting tweets in Tweet's model.

  • getTweets (TwitterCriteria): Return the list of tweets retrieved by using an instance of TwitterCriteria.

• TwitterCriteria: A collection of search parameters to be used together with TweetManager.

  • create: First method to be called, creates a new empty instance.
  • setUsername (String): An optional specific username from a twitter account. Without "@".
  • setSince (String. "yyyy-mm-dd"): A lower bound date to restrict search.
  • setUntil (String. "yyyy-mm-dd"): An upper bound date to restrist search.
  • setQuerySearch (String): A query text to be matched.
  • setMaxTweets (int): The maximum number of tweets to be retrieved. If this number is unsetted or lower than 1 all possible tweets will be retrieved.
  • optional - [output] (str): The name of the file where to store the results (default: got_output.csv)

• Main: A simple class showing examples of use.

• Exporter: A class to execute tweets search through command-line.

• got.jar: A runnable jar to call Exporter class. The result goes to a generated csv file named "output_got.csv".

Examples of java use

• Get tweets by username

    TwitterCriteria criteria = TwitterCriteria.create()
				.setUsername("barackobama")
				.setMaxTweets(1);
    Tweet t = TweetManager.getTweets(criteria).get(0);
    System.out.println(t.getText());

• Get tweets by query search

    TwitterCriteria criteria = TwitterCriteria.create()
				.setQuerySearch("europe refugees")
				.setMaxTweets(1);
    Tweet t = TweetManager.getTweets(criteria).get(0);
    System.out.println(t.getText());

• Get tweets by username and bound dates

    TwitterCriteria criteria = TwitterCriteria.create()
				.setUsername("barackobama")
				.setSince("2015-09-10")
				.setUntil("2015-09-12")
				.setMaxTweets(1);
    Tweet t = TweetManager.getTweets(criteria).get(0);
    System.out.println(t.getText());

Examples of command-line use

• Get help use

    java -jar got.jar -h

• Get tweets by username

    java -jar got.jar username=barackobama maxtweets=1

• Get tweets by query search

    java -jar got.jar querysearch="europe refugees" maxtweets=1

• Get tweets by username and bound dates

    java -jar got.jar username=barackobama since=2015-09-10 until=2015-09-12 maxtweets=1