I created a loop function that extract tweets using the search api with a certain interval (lets say every 5 min.). This function does what it suppose to do: connect to twitter, extracts tweets that contain a certain keyword, and saves them in a csv file. However occasionally (2-3 times a day) the loop is stopped because of one of these two errors:
Error in htmlTreeParse(URL, useInternal = TRUE) : error in creating parser for http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q= 6.95322e-310tst&rpp=100&page=10
Error in UseMethod("xmlNamespaceDefinitions") : no applicable method for 'xmlNamespaceDefinitions' applied to an object of class "NULL"
I hope you can help me deal with these errors, by answering some of my questions:
- What causes these errors to occur?
- How can I adjust my code to avoid these errors?
- How can I 'force' the loop to keep running if it experiences an error (e.g. by using the Try function)?
My function (based on several scripts found online) is as follows:
library(XML) # htmlTreeParse
twitter.search <- "Keyword"
QUERY <- URLencode(twitter.search)
# Set time loop (in seconds)
d_time = 300
number_of_times = 3000
for(i in 1:number_of_times){
tweets <- NULL
tweet.count <- 0
page <- 1
read.more <- TRUE
while (read.more)
{
# construct Twitter search URL
URL <- paste('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=',QUERY,'&rpp=100&page=', page, sep='')
# fetch remote URL and parse
XML <- htmlTreeParse(URL, useInternal=TRUE, error = function(...){})
# Extract list of "entry" nodes
entry <- getNodeSet(XML, "//entry")
read.more <- (length(entry) > 0)
if (read.more)
{
for (i in 1:length(entry))
{
subdoc <- xmlDoc(entry[[i]]) # put entry in separate object to manipulate
published <- unlist(xpathApply(subdoc, "//published", xmlValue))
published <- gsub("Z"," ", gsub("T"," ",published) )
# Convert from GMT to central time
time.gmt <- as.POSIXct(published,"GMT")
local.time <- format(time.gmt, tz="Europe/Amsterdam")
title <- unlist(xpathApply(subdoc, "//title", xmlValue))
author <- unlist(xpathApply(subdoc, "//author/name", xmlValue))
tweet <- paste(local.time, " @", author, ": ", title, sep="")
entry.frame <- data.frame(tweet, author, local.time, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
tweet.count <- tweet.count + 1
rownames(entry.frame) <- tweet.count
tweets <- rbind(tweets, entry.frame)
}
page <- page + 1
read.more <- (page <= 15) # Seems to be 15 page limit
}
}
names(tweets)
# top 15 tweeters
#sort(table(tweets$author),decreasing=TRUE)[1:15]
write.table(tweets, file=paste("Twitts - ", format(Sys.time(), "%a %b %d %H_%M_%S %Y"), ".csv"), sep = ";")
Sys.sleep(d_time)
} # end if