How to find a users most popular mentions from Twitter API

I'm trying to figure out a way to find who a user mentions the most in their tweets.

i.e. if there was someone I constantly replied to or mentioned, what would be the best way to find that out?

I'm using Rails and the Twitter gem for this project. If I could return the users most recent 200 tweets and run some sort of query that might work, just not sure what sort of query I would run.

Any ideas how to solve thi开发者_如何学Gos much appreciated.

Unless the Twitter gem has a way to extract @ mentions from a single Tweet, you could just get them out with something like

"haha @foo @bar sdasda".split.select { |t| t.start_with? '@' } #=> ["@foo", "@bar"]

Map that over all of the user's tweets, get an array of mentions and then count them.

Edit to answer the question from your comment:

>> tweets = ["haha @foo @bar sdasda", "lalal @foo", "@bar @foo"] #=> ["haha @foo @bar sdasda", "lalal @foo", "@bar @foo"]
>> tweets.map do |t| 
>>   t.split.select { |t| t.start_with? '@' }
>> end.flatten.group_by { |e| e }.values.max_by(&:size).first #=> "@foo"

So basically you map over all the tweets, extracting the @ mentions. Then you join all the arrays together and find the most common element.

You can get any non-protected users tweets with a single unauthenticated API call to the user_timeline:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=SCREENNAME&count=200

From there, you would just parse the body of the returned JSON/XML (depending on your preferences) for @ mentions in the contents of tweets (in the text field).