Returning Twitter handles per dataframe row

Question

Given the following dataframe:

df <- as.data.frame(c("Testing @cspenn @test @hi","this is a tweet","this is a tweet with @mention of @twitter"))
names(df)[1] <- "content"

I'm trying to extract the individual twitter handles per row, instead of all at once.

From this example, I have this function which spits them all out, but I need them to remain contained to each row.

df$handles <- plyr::ddply(df, c("content"), function(x){
    mention <- unlist(stringr::str_extract_all(x$content, "@\\w+"))
    # some tweets do not contain mentions, making this necessary:
    if (length(mention) > 0){
        return(data.frame(mention = mention))
    } else {
        return(data.frame(mention = NA))    
    }
})

How I extract the handles only per row, instead of all at once?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 25 '19 at 18:47

2

You can do it like this.

xy <- stringr::str_extract_all(df$content, "@\\w+")
xy <- sapply(xy, FUN = paste, collapse = ", ")  # have all names concatenated
cbind(df, xy)

                                    content                  xy
1                 Testing @cspenn @test @hi @cspenn, @test, @hi
2                           this is a tweet                    
3 this is a tweet with @mention of @twitter  @mention, @twitter

answered Feb 25 '19 at 18:47

Roman Luštrik

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Thank you - ended up using the tidyverse solution. – Christopher Penn Feb 25 '19 at 19:11

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 25 '19 at 18:43

library(tidyverse)

df %>%
  mutate(mentions = str_extract_all(content, "@\\w+"))

Output:

                                    content            mentions
1                 Testing @cspenn @test @hi @cspenn, @test, @hi
2                           this is a tweet                    
3 this is a tweet with @mention of @twitter  @mention, @twitter

Returning Twitter handles per dataframe row

2 Answers2