Twitter search

This example uses Twitter’s search API to list recent tweets given a user query. New features introduced here include the URI builder and uri::encoded function.

The code

#include <boost/network/protocol/http/client.hpp>
#include "rapidjson/rapidjson.h"
#include "rapidjson/document.h"
#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    using namespace boost::network;
    using namespace rapidjson;

    if (argc != 2) {
        std::cout << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " <query>" << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }

    try {
        http::client client;

        uri::uri base_uri("http://search.twitter.com/search.json");

        std::cout << "Searching Twitter for query: " << argv[1] << std::endl;
        uri::uri search;
        search << base_uri << uri::query("q", uri::encoded(argv[1]));
        http::client::request request(search);
        http::client::response response = client.get(request);

        Document d;
        if (!d.Parse<0>(response.body().c_str()).HasParseError()) {
            const Value &results = d["results"];
            for (SizeType i = 0; i < results.Size(); ++i)
            {
                const Value &user = results[i]["from_user_name"];
                const Value &text = results[i]["text"];
                std::cout << "From: " << user.GetString() << std::endl
                          << "  " << text.GetString() << std::endl
                          << std::endl;
            }
        }
    }
    catch (std::exception &e) {
        std::cerr << e.what() << std::endl;
    }

    return 0;
}

Note

To parse the results of these queries, this example uses rapidjson, a header-only library that is released under the MIT License.

Building and running twitter_search

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib-build
$ make twitter_search

Twitter provides a powerful set of operators to modify the behaviour of search queries. Some examples are provided below:

$ ./example/twitter_search "Lady Gaga"

Returns any results that contain the exact phrase “Lady Gaga”.

$ ./example/twitter_search "#olympics"

Returns any results with the #olympics hash tag.

$ ./example/twitter_search "flight :("

Returns any results that contain “flight” and have a negative attitude.

More examples can be found on Twitter’s search API page.

Diving into the code

uri::uri base_uri("http://search.twitter.com/search.json");

std::cout << "Searching Twitter for query: " << argv[1] << std::endl;
uri::uri search;
search << base_uri << uri::query("q", uri::encoded(argv[1]));

The cpp-netlib URI builder uses a stream-like syntax to allow developers to construct more complex URIs. The example above re-uses the same base URI and allows the command line argument to be used as part of the URI query. The builder also supports percent encoding using the encoded directive.