dnitza / twitter-text-rb

A library that does auto linking and extraction of usernames, lists and hashtags in tweets

twitter-text <img src=“https://secure.travis-ci.org/twitter/twitter-text-rb.png” />¶ ↑

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: “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.

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