How To Extract Data From Twitter Easily
Octo parse, an automated web scraping tool, may be used to extract data from Twitter. Octo parse is a web scraping tool that mimics human interaction with online pages. It enables you to retrieve all of the information shown on any website, including Twitter. With its simple point-and-click interface, you can quickly create a customized crawler to retrieve Tweets from an account, Tweets containing specified hashtags, Tweets sent within a specific time window, and so on. The extracted data may then be exported to Excel sheets, CSV, HTML, SQL, or streamed into your database in real-time using Octopuses APIs.
Before we begin, you may download and install Octo parse on your PC by clicking here. I suggest getting version 8 since it is more user-friendly for beginners. Let’s look at how to create a Twitter crawler in Octo parse in 3 minutes.
Step1: Enter the URL and configure the pagination.
Assume we’re attempting to scrape all of a certain handler’s tweets. In this scenario, we are scraping Octo parse’s official Twitter account. The webpage, as you can see, is loaded in the built-in browser. Many websites feature a “next page” button that Octo parse may use to go to each page and get additional information. However, in this scenario, Twitter employs a “infinite scrolling” strategy, which means you must scroll down the page to allow Twitter to load a few more tweets before extracting the data shown on the screen. So the final extraction procedure will be as follows: Octo parse will scroll down the page a little bit, extract the tweets, scroll down a little bit, extract, and so on.
To instruct the crawler to repeatedly scroll down the page, we may create a pagination loop by clicking on the blank area and selecting “loop click single element” from the Tips panel. As you can see, a pagination loop is shown in the workflow section, indicating that pagination was successfully configured.
Step 2: Create a loop item to extract data.
Let us now extract the tweets. Assume we want the handler, post time, text content, amount of comments, retweets, and likes.
Let’s start by creating an extraction loop to obtain the tweets one by one. We may click on the first tweet by hovering the mouse over its corner. When the whole tweet is highlighted in green, it indicates that it has been picked. Rep this step for the second tweet. As you can see, Octoparse is a sophisticated bot that has chosen all of the following tweets for you. When you click on “extract text of the chosen components,” you’ll see that an extraction loop is integrated into the process.
However, we want to extract various data fields into several columns rather than just one, therefore we must manually alter the extraction parameters to choose our desired data. This is a simple task. Make certain that you enter the “action setting” of the “extract data” stage. Select the handler and then select “extract the text of the chosen element.” Repeat this process until you have all of the data fields you want. When you’re done, remove the first large column that we don’t need and save the crawler. Our last step is now ahead of us.
Step3: Change the pagination settings and restart the crawler.
We created a pagination loop before, but we still need to make a little change to the workflow configuration. Because we want Twitter to completely load the material before the bot extracts it, let’s set the AJAX timeout to 5 seconds, giving Twitter 5 seconds to load after each scroll. Then, set both the scroll repeats and the wait time to 2 to ensure that Twitter correctly loads the material. Octo parse will now scroll down for two screens for each scroll, with each screen taking two seconds.
Return to the loop item settings and change the loop time to 20. This indicates that the bot will scroll for a total of 20 times. You may now run the crawler on your local device to collect data or on Octo parse Cloud servers to plan your runs and preserve your local resources. The blank cells in the columns indicate that there is no original data on the page, and hence nothing is extracted.
Final Words
Hope you now know the ways to extract data from twitter. You can share it with your friends
