Twitter Archive to JSON

README.md

If you download your personal Twitter archive, you don't quite get the data as JSON, but as a series of .js files, one for each month (there are meant to replicate the Twitter API respones for the front-end part of the downloadable archive.)

But if you want to be able to use the data in those files, which is far richer than the CSV data, for some analysis or app just run this script.

Run sh ./twitter-archive-to-json.sh in the same directory as the /tweets folder that comes with the archive download, and you'll get two files:

• tweets.json — a JSON list of the objects
• tweets_dict.json — a JSON dictionary where each Tweet's key is its id_str

You'll also get a /json-tweets directory which has the individual JSON files for each month of tweets.

twitter-archive-to-json.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
mkdir json-tweets
mkdir .tmp-json-tweets

touch .tmp-tweets.json
touch tweets.json
echo "" > tweets.json
echo "" > .tmp-tweets.json

echo "Processing Tweet.js files..."
for f in tweets/*.js; do
    tail -n +2 "$f" > json-"${f%.js}".json
done

echo "Creating tweets.json..."
echo "[ {" >> .tmp-tweets.json
for f in json-tweets/*.json; do
    tail -n +2 "$f" | sed '$d' > .tmp-"${f%.js}"
    echo "}, {" >> .tmp-"${f%.js}"
    cat .tmp-"${f%.js}" >> .tmp-tweets.json
    rm .tmp-"${f%.js}"
done
rmdir .tmp-json-tweets
cat .tmp-tweets.json | sed '$d' > tweets.json
echo "} ]" >> tweets.json
rm .tmp-tweets.json
cat tweets.json | jq  '. | map({"key": .id_str | tostring, "value": .}) | from_entries' > tweets_dict.json
echo "DONE"

Is it just me or does twitter now export in a single .js file instead?

nvm, ignore that

It is a giant json these days. You just have to strip off the leading window.YTD.tweet.part0 = to make it valid JSON

Running the script just returns a zero-byte file for me.

@tsuliwaensis You shouldn't need to run it anymore. Your archived tweets are already JSON, and once you edit the file to remove window.YTD.tweet.part0 = it will be valid JSON.

It is a giant json these days. You just have to strip off the leading window.YTD.tweet.part0 = to make it valid JSON

Thank you!

A batch job for creating json digests from the js archive distribution of the Twitter archive from within the data directory could look like:

rsync -I --backup --suffix='.json' --backup-dir='json' --exclude='manifest.js' ./*.js ./
sed -i -r 's/^window.*\ \=\ (.*)$/\1/' json/*

You can then dig into your data at will:

jq '.[] | .tweet | select(.entities.urls != []) | .entities | .urls | map(.expanded_url) | .[]' tweet.js.json | cut -d'/' -f3 | sed 's/\"//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -g

Please note this will update the file modification times for the *.js files from the ones provided by the archive to the moment of running the command, due to the -I ignore switch, which makes rsync copy every file over itself.

Adapted from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/527037/79223