Load and explore your Twitter data
Now that you've got your Twitter data sitting locally in a text file, it's time to explore it! This is what you'll do in the next few interactive exercises. In this exercise, you'll read the Twitter data into a list: tweets_data.
Be aware that this is real data from Twitter and as such there is always a risk that it may contain profanity or other offensive content (in this exercise, and any following exercises that also use real Twitter data).
This exercise is part of the course
Intermediate Importing Data in Python
Exercise instructions
- Assign the filename
'tweets.txt'to the variabletweets_data_path. - Initialize
tweets_dataas an empty list to store the tweets in. - Within the
forloop initiated byfor line in tweets_file:, load each tweet into a variable,tweet, usingjson.loads(), then appendtweettotweets_datausing theappend()method. - Hit submit and check out the keys of the first tweet dictionary printed to the shell.
Hands-on interactive exercise
Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.
# Import package
import json
# String of path to file: tweets_data_path
# Initialize empty list to store tweets: tweets_data
# Open connection to file
tweets_file = open(tweets_data_path, "r")
# Read in tweets and store in list: tweets_data
for line in tweets_file:
____
____
# Close connection to file
tweets_file.close()
# Print the keys of the first tweet dict
print(tweets_data[0].keys())