README.md

In denisStukal/Rvk: Access to VK (VKontakte) API through R

Rvk: R Interface to VK (VKontakte) API

Hi! Welcome to Rvk, an R package to access VK data!

VK is a highly popular social network in Russia and some other countries that has an open API allowing to access and analyze large amounts of data. This package provides a set of functions to extract publicly available data from VK.

Installation

The package requires R version 3.4.0 or higher. You can check your current version with:

sessionInfo()

The first row of the output shows your version of R. If it's lower than the required, download the new version.

If the version requirement is satistied, you can easily install the package from GitHub:

install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('denisStukal/Rvk')

Authorization

Most functions require that you pass your access token as a function argument. An access token is a unique set of symbols that works as your password to API calls. If you have already used VK API and have a token, you can skip this section and jump immediately to the next section to start working with VK data. Otherwise, read documentation for the makeAccessToken() function that will take you through the process:

?Rvk::makeAccessToken

Example 1: Personal VK page

I'm going to scrape the VK page for Rvk Demo, an account created for this R package, as an example of how to use the package to access and process VK data.

# Set the user ID (available from the user page) and the access token
userid = 442316971 
mytoken = readLines(con = '~/Downloads/mytoken_trial')

# Get basic information about the group
user_info <- Rvk::getUserInfo(user_id = userid, access_token = mytoken)
str(user_info)

## 'data.frame':    1 obs. of  22 variables:
##  $ id                 : int 442316971
##  $ first_name         : chr "Rvk"
##  $ last_name          : chr "Demo"
##  $ sex                : chr "male"
##  $ screen_name        : chr "id442316971"
##  $ bdate              : chr "14.8.2000"
##  $ city               : chr "New York City"
##  $ country            : chr "США"
##  $ relation           : int 0
##  $ has_photo          : int 1
##  $ num_wall_comments  : int 1
##  $ photo_url          : chr "https://pp.userapi.com/c837532/v837532153/58c54/Pbb6JXejpJc.jpg"
##  $ has_mobile         : int 1
##  $ status             : chr ""
##  $ last_seen          : int 1504195904
##  $ last_seen_date     : Date, format: "2017-08-31"
##  $ universities_number:List of 1
##   ..$ : logi 
##  $ universities       :List of 1
##   ..$ : logi 
##  $ schools_number     :List of 1
##   ..$ : logi 
##  $ schools            :List of 1
##   ..$ : logi 
##  $ jobs_number        :List of 1
##   ..$ : logi 
##  $ career             :List of 1
##   ..$ : logi

Now, we want to scrape the user's wall and get some publicly available posts. While executing this command, we need to specify the number of posts we want to retrieve. We could potentially consider all of them, but I will take only the last 5.

user_wall <- Rvk::getUserWall(user_id = userid, access_token = mytoken, n = 5)

## Total time: 0.029 minutes

str(subset(user_wall, select = c(id, date, text, comments_count, likes_count, reposts_count, reposted, reposted_from_id, reposted_original_date)))

## 'data.frame':    5 obs. of  9 variables:
##  $ id                    : int  2 6 5 4 3
##  $ date                  : Date, format: "2017-08-14" "2017-08-15" ...
##  $ text                  : chr  "Hi! My name is Denis Stukal, and I am glad to finally preset the first R package that provides a set of functio"| __truncated__ "\"Now is better than ever before to start studying machine learning and artificial intelligence. The field has "| __truncated__ "Having a vacation in academia be like...\nAccessed from: http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd080117s.gif" "" ...
##  $ comments_count        : int  0 1 2 0 0
##  $ likes_count           : int  2 2 2 1 1
##  $ reposts_count         : int  1 1 0 0 0
##  $ reposted              : num  0 0 0 1 0
##  $ reposted_from_id      : int  NA NA NA -138477641 NA
##  $ reposted_original_date: num  NA NA NA 17392 NA

One can get most important posts by extracting those that were liked, reposted, or commented the most. First, let's look at the distribution of the number of likes for the extracted 5 posts.

barplot(table(user_wall$likes_count), main = 'Distribution of likes', xlab = 'Likes count')

Most posts are liked just once, but there is one post that got 2 likes. Let's extract it as well as most commented and reposted posts.

# Posts: most liked
most_liked <- user_wall$id[order(user_wall$likes_count, decreasing = T)][1]
range(user_wall$likes_count[user_wall$id %in% most_liked])

## [1] 2 2

# Posts: most commented
most_commented <- user_wall$id[order(user_wall$comments_count, decreasing = T)][1]
range(user_wall$comments_count[user_wall$id %in% most_commented])

## [1] 2 2

# Posts: most reposted
most_reposted <- user_wall$id[order(user_wall$reposts_count, decreasing = T)][1]
range(user_wall$reposts_count[user_wall$id %in% most_reposted])

## [1] 1 1

One can also identify the most active users by activity type (liking, reposting, commenting).

users_like <- Rvk::getUserMostLikingUsers(user_id = userid, num_posts = 5, num_users = 2, access_token = mytoken)

## Total time: 0.3458333 minutes

users_repost <- Rvk::getUserMostRepostingUsers(user_id = userid, num_posts = 5, num_users = 2, access_token = mytoken)

## Total time: 0.2075167 minutes

users_comment <- Rvk::getUserMostCommentingUsers(user_id = userid, num_posts = 5, num_users = 2, access_token = mytoken)

## Total time: 0.15475 minutes

These three variables store data.frames with user IDs and numbers of likes/reposts/comments for those users who left most of those on the wall. Had there been no likes/reposts/comments, the corresponding variable would have been NULL.

Finally, you might be interested in the number of and information about all friends the user has. You can get those as easily as this:

friends_num <- Rvk::getUserFriendsNum(user_id = userid, access_token = mytoken)
friends_data <- Rvk::getUserFriendsInfo(user_id = userid, access_token = mytoken)

Example 2: Searching for information on VK

Rvk also allows you searching for VK posts that contain specific words or expressions.

newposts <- search_newsfeed(query = 'moscow', access_token = mytoken)

At the time of this writing, VK API returns at most 1,000 posts for search queries, so the command above will return 1000 latest posts that mention Moscow.

Nevertheless, one can get around the 1000 limit by iteratively specifying an exact time period for posts to be retrieved. For example, one can first extract all posts mentioning Moscow between 12PM and 3PM on September 4, 2017; and then go deeper in time (say, 9AM and 12PM of the same day):

newposts1 <- search_newsfeed(query = 'moscow', start_time = '2017-09-04 12:00:00', end_time = '2017-09-04 15:00:00', access_token = mytoken)
newposts1 <- search_newsfeed(query = 'moscow', start_time = '2017-09-04 09:00:00', end_time = '2017-09-04 12:00:00', access_token = mytoken)

NB! Time is specified as UTC (GMT).

Now, you're well equipped to proceed scraping VK on your own! Good luck!

denisStukal/Rvk documentation built on June 3, 2019, 5:56 p.m.