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Twitter Exporter

Primary Use Cases

  1. You want to export your Twitter data into small files that can be further processed (perhaps into posts for a statically-generated site?)
  2. You periodically want to enforce a time-to-live on your tweets shorter than...forever

Step 0: Understand the Plan

The basic operation is to:

  1. Get tweets with their unique ID
  2. Create a list of unique IDs to delete
  3. Provide a list of "deletables" to to twitter_rm.py

Step 1: Export Your Archive

Export your tweet archive. It's probably worth putting this raw export into version control.

Step 2: Factor Tweets into Files

Put the file tweet.js, from your tweet archive export, into your local clone of this repository. Use export_tweets.js to pull all your tweets into files Look in the converted_tweets

converted_tweets
├── 2008
│   ├── 08
│   │   ├── 22
│   │   │   ├── 2008-08-22-895722280.tweet.json
│   │   │   ├── 2008-08-22-895741518.tweet.json
│   │   │   ├── 2008-08-22-895834676.tweet.json
│   │   │   ├── 2008-08-22-895999543.tweet.json
│   │   │   ├── 2008-08-22-896021129.tweet.json
│   │   │   ├── 2008-08-22-896076861.tweet.json

Here's what's inside one of those files:

$ more ./converted_tweets/2008/08/22/2008-08-22-895722280.tweet.json
{"coordinates":null,"retweeted":false,"source":"<a href=\"http://twitter.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Twitter Web Client</a>","entities":{"hashtags":[],"symbols":[],"user_mentions":[],"urls":[]},"display_text_range":["0.0","128.0"],"favorite_count":"0.0","in_reply_to_status_id_str":null,"geo":null,"id_str":"895722280","in_reply_to_user_id":null,"truncated":false,"retweet_count":"0.0","id":"8.9572228E8","in_reply_to_status_id":null,"created_at":"Fri Aug 22 17:19:38 +0000 2008","place":null,"favorited":false,"full_text":"I just joined twitter after disparaging it, hating it, not getting it and generally thinking it kinda sucked.  Hell much colder.","lang":"en","contributors":null,"in_reply_to_screen_name":null,"in_reply_to_user_id_str":null}

Step 3: Build a List of Deletables

There are a lot of ways to go about building this list. Given a collection of tweets as independent files (i.e. after using export_tweets.js), query.py can provides a menu-based interface to decide which IDs are added to deletables.txt. This file can then be processed. A lower-fi version will be discussed subsequently.

./query.py (subdir)

$ ./query.py 2008`

Preview of Interface with my first Tweet

My First Tweet: time to go!

Hat Tip: Clayton McCloud's ncurses demo

Here I'm going to find all the exported tweets in 2008. I could do 2008/08. The goal is to make deleting easy. We use a dating-app-like interface to arrange Death + Our tweet.

  • RIGHT: Adds the tweet id to deletables.txt which we can feed to the twitter API to do the finale remove later. THIS ALSO DELETES THE FILE FROM LOCAL STORAGE
  • LEFT: Adds the tweet id to deletables.txt which we can feed to the twitter API to do the finale remove later. This DOES NOT remove the local file. You might reuse this content for a book, or a scrapbook, or import into come other CMS.

CAVEAT: This menu is not very smart and may not work (right, at all) in narrow widths. Should be fine at 80 x 40. This is write-once code. Bugs and snarly code to be expected.

Perhaps you can't use an ncurses menu-driven program like query.py. If all the files are under git revision control, an alternative approach might be something as simple as:

for file in $(ls *.json); do
  jq '' $file
  rm -i $file
done

One could then use git diff and grep to capture the deleted IDs.

Step 4: Delete

Delete the tweets (twitter_rm.py).

In order to do so, you'll need to acquire 4 developer tokens from Twitter as documented at python-twitter.

I stored mine in a file called secrets, but the variables you should export into the shell or the Docker environment that will run your tasks are:

CONSUMER_KEY
CONSUMER_SECRET
ACCESS_TOKEN
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

An invocation using a locally-installed Python might look like:

$ source secrets && PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 ./twitter_rm.py |tee deletions.log

Requirements

  • export_tweets.js requires a Node runtime. The Docker image is fine.
  • twitter_rm.py requires a Python runtime. The Docker image is fine as well.

Ongoing Maintenance

If you occasionally find yourself tweeting and want to delete your payload, follow these steps that leverage Docker.

First build the Docker image:

docker build  .  -t twimg

Then, provided a file with the API keys called twitter_secrets that holds API key data per above:

docker run --env-file twitter_secrets -v $(pwd):/workarea -it --rm twimg python get_recent_tweets.py $TWITTER_ID |tee del

will run in the Dockerized environment:

python get_recent_tweets.py $TWITTER_ID |tee del

and produce a list of tweets with their ID to STDOUT (and redirect into a file called del per the tee program's specification)

We can then feed that file into:

 docker run --env-file twitter_secrets -v $(pwd):/workarea -it --rm twimg python twitter_rm.py del

And, violà you'll remove those tweets!