streamR (version 0.2.1)

sampleStream: Connect to Twitter Streaming API and return a small random sample of all public statuses.

Description

sampleStream opens a connection to Twitter's Streaming API that will return a small random sample of public statuses, around 1% at any given time.

Usage

sampleStream(file.name, timeout = 0, tweets = NULL,
    oauth = NULL, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

file.name

string, name of the file where tweets will be written. "" indicates output to the console, which can be redirected to an R object. If the file already exists, tweets will be appended (not overwritten).

timeout

numeric, maximum length of time (in seconds) of connection to stream. The connection will be automatically closed after this period. For example, setting timeout to 10800 will keep the connection open for 3 hours. The default is 0, which will keep the connection open permanently.

tweets

numeric, maximum number of tweets to be collected when function is called. After that number of tweets have been captured, function will stop. If set to NULL (default), the connection will be open for the number of seconds specified in timeout parameter.

oauth

an object of class oauth that contains the access tokens to the user's twitter session. This is currently the only method for authentication. See examples for more details.

verbose

logical, default is TRUE, which generates some output to the R console with information about the capturing process.

Details

For more information, check the documentation at: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/sample

Note that when no file name is provided, tweets are written to a temporary file, which is loaded in memory as a string vector when the connection to the stream is closed.

The total number of actual tweets that are captured might be lower than the number of tweets requested because blank lines, deletion notices, and incomplete tweets are included in the count of tweets downloaded.

See Also

filterStream, userStream, parseTweets

Examples

# NOT RUN {
## capture a random sample of tweets
sampleStream( file.name="tweets_sample.json", user=FOO, password=BAR )

## An example of an authenticated request using the ROAuth package,
## where consumerkey and consumer secret are fictitious.
## You can obtain your own at dev.twitter.com
 library(ROAuth)
 reqURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token"
 accessURL <- "http://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token"
 authURL <- "http://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize"
 consumerKey <- "xxxxxyyyyyzzzzzz"
 consumerSecret <- "xxxxxxyyyyyzzzzzzz111111222222"
  my_oauth <- OAuthFactory$new(consumerKey=consumerKey,
    consumerSecret=consumerSecret, requestURL=requestURL,
    accessURL=accessURL, authURL=authURL)
 my_oauth$handshake(cainfo = system.file("CurlSSL", "cacert.pem", package = "RCurl"))
 sampleStream( file.name="tweets_sample.json", oauth=my_oauth )

# }