How to crawl retweets of a certain user?

I studied the Twitter API Documentation today. Only find that we could use "Twitter REST API Method: statuses user_timeline" to acquire statuses of a certain user. Retweets are stripped out of the user_timeline for backwards compatibility reasons. If I want retweets included, API Documentation recommend "statuses retweeted_by_me", but retweeted_by_me cannot return the retweets by other users.

I think maybe we can analyse the twitter webpage of a certain user to get his retweets. However is there a开发者_运维技巧ny elegant way to crawl retweets of a certain user?

Thanks in advance!

This was addressed recently by the Twitter devs. You can now add a include_rts=true to your call to user_timeline. See the full discussion here: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/7a4be385ff549ed0

You want to use the retweeted_to_me API call and then create a union with user_timeline and sort by datetime. It's a little annoying that they don't mix the stream for you.

Call statuses/user_timeline for the specific user then for each status you will have to call either statuses/id/retweeted_by or statuses/retweets.

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-GET-statuses-id-retweeted_by http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-statuses-retweets

You have to manually use GET statuses/retweets/:id for every Tweet from the use_timeline.