nltk.corpus.reader.TwitterCorpusReader

class nltk.corpus.reader.TwitterCorpusReader

Bases: CorpusReader

Reader for corpora that consist of Tweets represented as a list of line-delimited JSON.

Individual Tweets can be tokenized using the default tokenizer, or by a custom tokenizer specified as a parameter to the constructor.

Construct a new Tweet corpus reader for a set of documents located at the given root directory.

If you made your own tweet collection in a directory called twitter-files, then you can initialise the reader as:

from nltk.corpus import TwitterCorpusReader
reader = TwitterCorpusReader(root='/path/to/twitter-files', '.*\.json')

However, the recommended approach is to set the relevant directory as the value of the environmental variable TWITTER, and then invoke the reader as follows:

root = os.environ['TWITTER']
reader = TwitterCorpusReader(root, '.*\.json')

If you want to work directly with the raw Tweets, the json library can be used:

import json
for tweet in reader.docs():
    print(json.dumps(tweet, indent=1, sort_keys=True))

CorpusView

alias of StreamBackedCorpusView

__init__(root, fileids=None, word_tokenizer=<nltk.tokenize.casual.TweetTokenizer object>, encoding='utf8')

Parameters

• root – The root directory for this corpus.

• fileids – A list or regexp specifying the fileids in this corpus.

• word_tokenizer – Tokenizer for breaking the text of Tweets into smaller units, including but not limited to words.

docs(fileids=None)

Returns the full Tweet objects, as specified by Twitter documentation on Tweets

Returns

the given file(s) as a list of dictionaries deserialised from JSON.

Return type

list(dict)

strings(fileids=None)

Returns only the text content of Tweets in the file(s)

Returns

the given file(s) as a list of Tweets.

Return type

list(str)

tokenized(fileids=None)

Returns

the given file(s) as a list of the text content of Tweets as as a list of words, screenanames, hashtags, URLs and punctuation symbols.

Return type

list(list(str))

abspath(fileid)

Return the absolute path for the given file.

Parameters

fileid (str) – The file identifier for the file whose path should be returned.

Return type

PathPointer

abspaths(fileids=None, include_encoding=False, include_fileid=False)

Return a list of the absolute paths for all fileids in this corpus; or for the given list of fileids, if specified.

Parameters

• fileids (None or str or list) – Specifies the set of fileids for which paths should be returned. Can be None, for all fileids; a list of file identifiers, for a specified set of fileids; or a single file identifier, for a single file. Note that the return value is always a list of paths, even if fileids is a single file identifier.

• include_encoding – If true, then return a list of (path_pointer, encoding) tuples.

Return type

list(PathPointer)

citation()

Return the contents of the corpus citation.bib file, if it exists.

encoding(file)

Return the unicode encoding for the given corpus file, if known. If the encoding is unknown, or if the given file should be processed using byte strings (str), then return None.

ensure_loaded()

Load this corpus (if it has not already been loaded). This is used by LazyCorpusLoader as a simple method that can be used to make sure a corpus is loaded – e.g., in case a user wants to do help(some_corpus).

fileids()

Return a list of file identifiers for the fileids that make up this corpus.

license()

Return the contents of the corpus LICENSE file, if it exists.

open(file)

Return an open stream that can be used to read the given file. If the file’s encoding is not None, then the stream will automatically decode the file’s contents into unicode.

Parameters

file – The file identifier of the file to read.

raw(fileids=None)

Parameters

fileids – A list specifying the fileids that should be used.

Returns

the given file(s) as a single string.

Return type

str

readme()

Return the contents of the corpus README file, if it exists.

property root

The directory where this corpus is stored.

Type

PathPointer