Searching for Tweets with Unicode Character / Apple Emoji?

Question

I am compiling a corpus of Tweets for sentiment analysis and am trying to grab Tweets with Apple Emoji characters.

I have found the unicode character for one of the faces as: U+1F604 (U+D83D U+DE04), UTF-8: F0 9F 98 84

So far, I haven't been able to get any meaningful results. If I search \ud83d\ude04 I'll get some Tweets back, but nothing useful. \U0001f604 doesn't return anything on search.

Is there any way for me to query Twitter for these characters?

I am using the python-twitter wrapper for the API, but would be willing to use something else if a better alternative exists.

Answer 1

As @Terence Eden points out, twitters REST search api doesn't work with emoji characters, but the streaming API does (as of Jan 2016).

There are a few tools out there for accessing twitters APIs in python. The one I've mostly used it tweepy. It can be installed with pip.

The tweepy docs on setting up the streaming api are quite easy to follow. The strings you filter on need to contain the actual emoji characters (e.g.: '😀').

Note that this searches for emojis as "words": that is, surrounded by white space. Something like "free😀" won't be found!

Answer 2

This is possible - but it's slightly tricky....

You can't use the standard Twitter search - but you can use the Streaming Search.

There are open source libraries available at https://github.com/mroth/emojitrack-feeder in Ruby and Node.