Katy likes to get her hands on interesting data. Recently, it’s been Twitter data among other things. Here are the steps I recently followed to get Twurl working on her Windows laptop.

• Download and install Ruby using Ruby Installer
• Open a Windows command prompt
• Check that Ruby is installed: ruby --version
• Check that RubyGems is installed: gem --version
• Install Twurl: gem install twurl
• Grab your consumer key and consumer secret from here
• Authorize Twurl
  • Use your consumer key/secret: twurl authorize --consumer-key CONSUMER_KEY --consumer-secret CONSUMER_SECRET
  • Copy and paste the link output by the command into your browser
  • Follow the prompts
  • Click Authorize app
  • Copy the 7-digit PIN displayed on the final page
  • Paste the PIN into the command prompt
• Test Twurl: twurl /1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json

Next, we can run some Twitter search queries. Here’s the search example tweaked a little so it actually works:

Notice how I’ve surrounded the URL with double quotes: this is necessary since the & character has special meaning on most operating systems including Windows.

This command will generate a blob of JSON. You can save this to a file as follows:

This will create a file named nasa.json. You can pretty-print this JSON to the command prompt using a little Ruby script as follows:

A roughly equivalent Python script might be:

Note that this only returns the first 15 tweets. Here’s a bigger Python script that will handle the pagination for you:

Done for now.

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