rb

twitter-text

A gem that provides text processing routines for Twitter Tweets. The major reason for this is to unify the various auto-linking and extraction of usernames, lists, hashtags and URLs.

Extraction Examples

Extraction

class MyClass
  include Twitter::Extractor
  usernames = extract_mentioned_screen_names("Mentioning @twitter and @jack")
  # usernames = ["twitter", "jack"]
end

Extraction with a block argument

class MyClass
  include Twitter::Extractor
  extract_reply_screen_name("@twitter are you hiring?").do |username|
    # username = "twitter"
  end
end

Auto-linking Examples

Auto-link

class MyClass
  include Twitter::Autolink

  html = auto_link("link @user, please #request")
end

For Ruby on Rails you want to add this to app/helpers/application_helper.rb

module ApplicationHelper
  include Twitter::Autolink
end

Now the auto_link function is available in every view. So in index.html.erb:

<%= auto_link("link @user, please #request") %>

Usernames

Username extraction and linking matches all valid Twitter usernames but does not verify that the username is a valid Twitter account.

Lists

Auto-link and extract list names when they are written in @user/list-name format.

Hashtags

Auto-link and extract hashtags, where a hashtag can contain most letters or numbers but cannot be solely numbers and cannot contain punctuation.

URLs

Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean may not use a delimiter such as a space to separate normal text from URLs making it difficult to identify where the URL ends and the text starts.

For this reason twitter-text currently does not support extracting or auto-linking of URLs immediately followed by non-Latin characters.

Example: "http://twitter.com/は素晴らしい" . The normal text is "は素晴らしい" and is not part of the URL even though it isn't space separated.

International

Special care has been taken to be sure that auto-linking and extraction work in Tweets of all languages. This means that languages without spaces between words should work equally well.

Hit Highlighting

Use to provide emphasis around the "hits" returned from the Search API, built to work against text that has been auto-linked already.

Thanks

Thanks to everybody who has filed issues, provided feedback or contributed patches. Patches courtesy of:

• At Twitter …

  • Matt Sanford - http://github.com/mzsanford
  • Raffi Krikorian - http://github.com/r
  • Ben Cherry - http://github.com/bcherry
  • Patrick Ewing - http://github.com/hoverbird
  • Jeff Smick - http://github.com/sprsquish
  • Kenneth Kufluk - https://github.com/kennethkufluk
  • Keita Fujii - https://github.com/keitaf
  • Yoshimasa Niwa - https://github.com/niw

• Patches from the community …

  • Jean-Philippe Bougie - http://github.com/jpbougie
  • Erik Michaels-Ober - https://github.com/sferik

• Anyone who has filed an issue. It helps. Really.

Copyright and License

Copyright 2011 Twitter, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0