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twitter-text

This is the Ruby implementation of the twitter-text parsing library. The library has methods to parse Tweets and calculate length, validity, parse @mentions, #hashtags, URLs, and more.

Setup

Installation uses bundler.

% gem install bundler
% bundle install

Conformance tests

To run the Conformance test suite from the command line via rake:

% rake test:conformance:run

You can also run the rspec tests in the spec directory:

% rspec spec

Length validation

twitter-text 2.0 introduces configuration files that define how Tweets are parsed for length. This allows for backwards compatibility and flexibility going forward. Old-style traditional 140-character parsing is defined by the v1.json configuration file, whereas v2.json is updated for "weighted" Tweets where ranges of Unicode code points can have independent weights aside from the default weight. The sum of all code points, each weighted appropriately, should not exceed the max weighted length.

Some old methods from twitter-text 1.0 have been marked deprecated, such as the tweet_length() method. The new API is based on the following method, parse_tweet()

def parse_tweet(text, options = {}) { ... }

This method takes a string as input and returns a results object that contains information about the string. Twitter::TwitterText::Validation::ParseResults object includes:

  • :weighted_length: the overall length of the tweet with code points weighted per the ranges defined in the configuration file.

  • :permillage: indicates the proportion (per thousand) of the weighted length in comparison to the max weighted length. A value > 1000 indicates input text that is longer than the allowable maximum.

  • :valid: indicates if input text length corresponds to a valid result.

  • :display_range_start, :display_range_end: An array of two unicode code point indices identifying the inclusive start and exclusive end of the displayable content of the Tweet. For more information, see the description of display_text_range here: Tweet updates

  • :valid_range_start, :valid_range_end: An array of two unicode code point indices identifying the inclusive start and exclusive end of the valid content of the Tweet. For more information on the extended Tweet payload see Tweet updates

Extraction Examples

Extraction

class MyClass
  include Twitter::TwitterText::Extractor
  usernames = extract_mentioned_screen_names("Mentioning @twitter and @jack")
  # usernames = ["twitter", "jack"]
end

Extraction with a block argument

class MyClass
  include Twitter::TwitterText::Extractor
  extract_reply_screen_name("@twitter are you hiring?").do |username|
    # username = "twitter"
  end
end

Auto-linking Examples

Auto-link

class MyClass
  include Twitter::TwitterText::Autolink

  html = auto_link("link @user, please #request")
end

For Ruby on Rails you want to add this to app/helpers/application_helper.rb

module ApplicationHelper
  include Twitter::TwitterText::Autolink
end

Now the auto_link function is available in every view. So in index.html.erb:

<%= auto_link("link @user, please #request") %>

Usernames

Username extraction and linking matches all valid Twitter usernames but does not verify that the username is a valid Twitter account.

Lists

Auto-link and extract list names when they are written in @user/list-name format.

Hashtags

Auto-link and extract hashtags, where a hashtag can contain most letters or numbers but cannot be solely numbers and cannot contain punctuation.

URLs

Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean may not use a delimiter such as a space to separate normal text from URLs making it difficult to identify where the URL ends and the text starts.

For this reason twitter-text currently does not support extracting or auto-linking of URLs immediately followed by non-Latin characters.

Example: "http://twitter.com/は素晴らしい" . The normal text is "は素晴らしい" and is not part of the URL even though it isn't space separated.

International

Special care has been taken to be sure that auto-linking and extraction work in Tweets of all languages. This means that languages without spaces between words should work equally well.

Hit Highlighting

Use to provide emphasis around the "hits" returned from the Search API, built to work against text that has been auto-linked already.

Issues

Have a bug? Please create an issue here on GitHub!

https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text/issues

Authors

V2.0

Previous authors

License

Copyright 2012-2020 Twitter, Inc and other contributors

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0