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¶ ↑

Auto-linking and extraction of URLs differs from the Rails default so that it will work correctly in Tweets written in languages that do not include spaces between words.

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.

Conformance¶ ↑

To run the Conformance suite, you’ll need to add that project as a git submodule. From the root twitter-text-rb directory, run:

git submodule add [email protected]:twitter/twitter-text-conformance.git test/twitter-text-conformance/
git submodule init
git submodule update

Thanks¶ ↑

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

• At Twitter …

  • Matt Sanford - github.com/mzsanford

  • Raffi Krikorian - github.com/r

  • Ben Cherry - github.com/bcherry

  • Patrick Ewing - github.com/hoverbird

  • Jeff Smick - github.com/sprsquish

  • Kenneth Kufluk - github.com/kennethkufluk

  • Keita Fujii - github.com/keitaf

  • Yoshimasa Niwa - github.com/niw

• Patches from the community …

  • Jean-Philippe Bougie - github.com/jpbougie

  • Erik Michaels-Ober - 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 (the "License");
you may not use this work except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License in the LICENSE file, or at:

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.