twitter-text-js

A JavaScript utility that provides text processing routines for Tweets. This library conforms to a common test suite shared by many other implementations, particularly twitter-text.gem (Ruby). The library provides autolinking and extraction for URLs, usernames, lists, and hashtags.

NPM Users

Install it with: npm install twitter-text

The twttr.txt namespace is exported, making it available as such:

var twitter = require('twitter-text')
twitter.autoLink(twitter.htmlEscape('#hello < @world >'))

Extraction Examples

// basic extraction
var usernames = twttr.txt.extractMentions("Mentioning @twitter and @jack")
// usernames == ["twitter", "jack"]

Auto-linking Examples

twttr.txt.autoLink("link @user, please #request");

twttr.txt.autoLink("link @user, and expand url... http://t.co/0JG5Mcq", {
    urlEntities: [
        {
          "url": "http://t.co/0JG5Mcq",
          "display_url": "blog.twitter.com/2011/05/twitte…",
          "expanded_url": "http://blog.twitter.com/2011/05/twitter-for-mac-update.html",
          "indices": [
            30,
            48
          ]
        }
    ]});

See Tweet Entities for more info getting url entities from Twitter's API.

Tweet Parsing

Previous versions of Twitter-Text provided different helper methods for Tweet validation, Tweet length, and remaining characters calculation. To simplify the API and obtain this information with just one call, Twitter-Text now exposes a new “parseTweet” method that will return the following fields:

• weightedLength: Integer that indicates the weighted length calculated by the algorithm above.
• permillage: Integer value corresponding to the ratio of consumed weighted length to the maximum weighted length.
• valid: Boolean indicating whether it is a valid Tweet.
• dispayRangeStart: Integer with start index on the Tweet string
• displayRangeEnd: Integer with end index on the Tweet string (inclusive)
• validDisplayRangeStart: Integer indicating the valid start index on the Tweet string
• validDisplayRangeEnd: Integer indicating the valid end index on the Tweet string. This can be lesser than displayRangeEnd (inclusive).

var tweet = "This is a test tweet";
twttr.txt.parseTweet(tweet);
/* Returns:
  {
    weightedLength: 20,
    permillage: 71,
    valid: true,
    displayRangeEnd: 19,
    displayRangeStart: 0,
    validRangeEnd: 19,
    validRangeStart: 0
  }
*/

Details about Twitter's weighted counting scheme are available on the official developer website.

Marked for Deprecation

getTweetLength returns the weighted length of a tweet that is calculated by parseTweet. It will be deprecated in a subsequent release. Please use parseTweet instead.

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 contains any latin letter or number but cannot be solely numbers.

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.

Testing

For all Twitter-Text tests, run:

npm run test

This will run conformance and javascript tests.

Conformance

The main test suite is twitter-text-conformance. Tests are run in your browser, using QUnit. To run the conformance suite, from the project root, run:

rake test:conformance

Your default browser will open the test suite. You should open the test suite in your other browsers as you see fit.

Other Tests

There are a few tests specific to twitter-text-js that are not part of the conformance suite. To run these, from the project root, run:

rake test

Your default browser will open the test suite.

Packaging

Official versions are kept in the pkg/ directory. To roll a new version, (ex. v1.1.0), run the following from project root:

rake package[1.1.0]

This will make a new file at pkg/twitter-text-1.1.0.js.

Reporting Bugs

Please direct bug reports to the twitter-text issue tracker on GitHub

Copyright and License

Copyright 2012 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.