In rmflight/socialmediascraping: Various functions for scraping and storing my own social media stuff

Twitter

library(twitteR)

Set up a twitter app at https://dev.twitter.com/apps

Fill in all the pertinent information.

To get OAuth tokens, go to Test OAuth, and it will show you the consumer key and consumer secret. I stored these in a folder that is not part of the package, in keys/tokent.txt and keys/secret.txt, respectively.

requestURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token"
accessURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token"
authURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize"

token <- scan("keys/twitterToken.txt", what="character", n=1)
secret <- scan("keys/twitterSecret.txt", what="character", n=1)

twitterCredentials <- OAuthFactory$new(consumerKey=token,
                                       consumerSecret=secret,
                                       requestURL=requestURL,
                                       accessURL=accessURL,
                                       authURL=authURL)

twitterCredentials$handshake()
registerTwitterOAuth(twitterCredentials)

testTweets <- homeTimeline()

save(twitterCredentials, file="keys/twitteRCredentials.RData") # saves for further use

Note that we have saved the credentials to a file that again is not part of the package. If we want to use our credentials later, we simply re-load them.

load("keys/twitteRCredentials.RData")
registerTwitterOAuth(twitterCredentials)
testTweets <- homeTimeline()

Facebook

Set up a Facebook app at https://developers.facebook.com/apps. Fill in the information.

Again, I have the ID and secret in text files that are not part of the package. During authorization, you will need to go into your Facebook app,

install.packages("Rfacebook")
install.packages("Rook")
library(Rfacebook)
appID <- scan("keys/facebookID.txt", what="character", n=1)
appSecret <- scan("keys/facebookSecret.txt", what="character", n=1)

Under Settings -> Basic -> Add Platform, select Website, and put in the web address that was supplied above (mine was http://localhost:1410/), and hit enter to continue.

fbAuth <- fbOAuth(app_id=appID, app_secret=appSecret)
save(fbAuth, file="keys/facebookCredentials.RData")

load("keys/facebookCredentials.RData")
me <- getUsers("me", token=fbAuth)
me
news <- getNewsfeed(fbAuth)

SSL Cert Error

If you get an SSL certification error, then you should run:

library(RCurl) 

# Set SSL certs globally
options(RCurlOptions = list(cainfo = system.file("CurlSSL", "cacert.pem", package = "RCurl")))

rmflight/socialmediascraping documentation built on May 27, 2019, 9:32 a.m.