Is there any built-in way to get the long, expanded URL from a twitter RSS feed? Right now the feed lists all the urls as http://t.co.... I'd like to do what the Twitter display does and display the long URLs; I'd also like to avoid having to do either an API call or HTTP request for each URL in the feed. Ideally, I'd also like to avoid using the Twitter API directly but if that's the only way, so be it.
I'm not interested in doing a separate request for every single t.co link, or calling the Twitter API. I was hoping there was a single request I could make that would include the long URLs in the metadata (or even provide the tweet in full expanded form as it appears on Twitter). Turns out the way to do this is by requesting the JSON version from search.twitter.com rather than the RSS feed, and tacking on include_entities=True.
I'm using http://search.twitter.com/search.rss to get a feed of tweets matching a search term. The feed contains only the shortened t.co urls. Is there a way to modify my request so that the tweets contain the expanded URLs instead?
The goal is to do just one request rather than having to go through the tweets and parse each t.co url separately (especially since for a feed with several dozen t.co urls, that means several dozen separate requests). If necessary, I am willing to use the Twitter API directly to do the search instead of using RSS, but for my purposes using a feed is more ideal.
No, Twitter does not offer a urls entity in its RSS responses, nor does the include_entities option appear to work. You'll have to use a different response format e.g. JSON (with which you can use the include_entities option which includes an entities['urls'][n]['expanded_url'] object), or "unshorten" the URLs yourself after the fact.