Question

We will use one full day worth of tweets as our input (there are total of 4.4M tweets in this file, but we will intentionally use fewer tweets to run this final): Execute and time the following tasks with 120,000 tweets and 600,000 tweets:

a. Use python to download tweets from the web and save to a local text file (not into a database yet, just to a text file). This is as simple as it sounds, all you need is a for-loop that reads lines from the web and writes them into a file.

Answer 1

The task involves using Python to download tweets and save them to a text file, using a for-loop and tweet APIs. Execution time is measured with Python's time module.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student's question regards how to use Python to download a specified number of tweets from the web and save them into a local text file. To accomplish this task, we would typically use Python's libraries such as requests or tweepy to handle the HTTP requests to download the tweet data. The process involves setting up a loop that iterates through tweet identifiers or uses streaming APIs, captures the data, and writes each tweet to a text file until the specified number of tweets is reached. Measuring the execution time can be done with Python's time module, capturing the start and end times of the operation.

To ensure only the required number of tweets is downloaded, one should institute a counter that is incremented for each tweet until it reaches either 120,000 or 600,000. Upon reaching the specified count, the loop can be stopped, and the timing measurements can be concluded.