twcloud

Generate a word cloud of Twitter tweets with a single command.

twcloud is a Python package that leverages the twint package to gather Tweets from any public account without requiring authentication, and the stylecloud package which adds many useful features to create truly unique word clouds!

• Retrieve tweets from a user, or a Twitter search.
• Gather any number of Tweets from the specified query for building the word cloud (even beyond the typical 3,200 limit)
• Command Line Interface!

Additionally, from the base stylecloud package:

• Icon shapes (of any size!) for word clouds
• Support for advanced color palettes (via palettable)
• Manual color selection for text and backgrounds,
• Directional gradients w/ the aforementioned palettes.

Installation

You can install twcloud via pip:

pip3 install twcloud

Usage

You can use twcloud in a Python script or as a standalone CLI app. For example, let's visualize Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's most recent Tweets:

From Python:

import twcloud

twcloud.gen_twcloud(username='jack')

Or from the command line:

twcloud --username jack

Or even more simply, to quickly gather tweets from a user:

twcloud jack

You can also search for keywords. How about finding English Tweets about #MondayNightFootball, and changing the theming appropriately?

import twcloud

twcloud.gen_twcloud(search='#MondayNightFootball lang:en',
                    icon_name='fas fa-football-ball',
                    background_color='black',
                    colors='yellow')

twcloud --search '#MondayNightFootball lang:en' --icon_name 'fas fa-football-ball' --background_color black --colors yellow

A little known feature of Twitter search is that if you search for a Tweet URL, you will get all Quote Tweets corresponding to that tweet. How about getting English quote tweets resulting from the recent tweet asking for quote tweets with controversial food opinions?

import twcloud

twcloud.gen_twcloud(search='https://twitter.com/jonbecker_/status/1196805486907052033 lang:en',
                    icon_name='fas fa-utensils',
                    background_color='#c0392b',
                    palette='colorbrewer.sequential.YlOrBr_3',
                    gradient='vertical')

twcloud --search 'https://twitter.com/jonbecker_/status/1196805486907052033 lang:en' --icon_name 'fas fa-utensils' --background_color '#c0392b' --palette colorbrewer.sequential.YlOrBr_3 --gradient vertical

Helpful Parameters

These parameters are valid for both the Python function and the CLI (you can use twcloud -- --help to get this information as well). Additional visual customization parameters can be found within the stylecloud repo.

• username: Twitter @ username to gather tweets (excluding the @). Any public Twitter account is valid.
• search: Search query to use. Can use a hashtag or a tweet URL (to get quote-tweets)
• limit: Number of tweets to gather before rendering the twcloud [default: 500]

stylecloud parameters w/ Changed Defaults

• icon_name: Icon Name for the stylecloud shape. (e.g. 'fas fa-grin') [default: fab fa-twitter]
• colors: Color(s) to use as the text colors. [default: white]
• background_color: Background color (name or hex) [default: #1DA1F2]
• output_name: Output file name of the stylecloud. [default: twcloud.png]

Helpful Notes

• Specifying a palette parameter will override the colors parameter. This is the reverse of stylecloud.
• Saving the retrieved tweets is out of scope for this package. If you want to save the tweets + additional metadata, use twint directly.
• username queries will not return Retweets made by the user.
• Advanced search filters can be useful too for increasing the quality of the twcloud, e.g. filter:verified to retrieve only tweets from verified users, or lang:en to retrieve only English tweets.

Maintainer/Creator

Max Woolf (@minimaxir)

Max's open-source projects are supported by his Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. If you found this project helpful, any monetary contributions to the Patreon are appreciated and will be put to good creative use.

License

MIT

Disclaimer

This repo has no affiliation with Twitter Inc.