Read Twitter page from Java

Question

I would like to read the content of a tweet from Java, by using the public link of that tweet, e.g.:

http://twitter.com/FoodRhythms/status/461201880354271232/photo/1

I am using the same procedure used for reading content from other types of pages:

String XMLstring = "";
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));

String inputLine;

while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
    XMLstring += inputLine;
in.close();

However, while with other pages this works, when reading from Twitter links the returned content is empty (the BufferedReader object does not contain any line).

Any hint on this?

Answer 1

You are approaching the problem in unnecessary complicated way. You would use an HTML parser library, such as Jsoup to parse the URL of it's content.

An example would be as follows:

String url = "https://twitter.com/FoodRhythms/status/461201880354271232/photo/1";
Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).get();
Element tweetText = doc.select("p.js-tweet-text.tweet-text").first();
System.out.println(tweetText.text());

which would output

Miso-Glazed Japanese Eggplant 

In a similar fashion, you can select any element you want!