https://github.com/mccutchen/twitter-url-regexen

The regular expression(s) Twitter uses to match URLs.
https://github.com/mccutchen/twitter-url-regexen

Last synced: 3 months ago
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The regular expression(s) Twitter uses to match URLs.

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/mccutchen/twitter-url-regexen
• Owner: mccutchen
• Archived: true
• Created: 2012-03-26T18:57:22.000Z (over 12 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2013-02-22T19:52:33.000Z (over 11 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-06-20T22:10:30.596Z (5 months ago)
• Language: Python
• Homepage:
• Size: 113 KB
• Stars: 6
• Watchers: 1
• Forks: 1
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md

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README

        
# Twitter URL Regexen

This is an attempt to extract the URL-matching regular expression(s) from the

[`twitter-text-rb`][1] project and port them to Python.

## What? Why?

This is important because any service that will be creating tweets on behalf

of its users needs to be able to provide those users an accurate character

count. Should be easy, right?  Nope! Now that Twitter is wrapping URLs in t.co

short links, the service in question will need to know exactly what parts of a

user's tweet will be replaced by shortened t.co URLs.

This is mind-bendingly stupid.

To alleviate some of the pain, Twitter has kindly provided reference

implementations for this behavior for [Ruby][1], [JavaScript][2], and

[Java][3], along with a [suite of conformance tests][4] for third party

implementers.

Unfortunately, they do not provide and maintain a reference implementation for

Python, and those that exist are incomplete (this particular little lib very

much included).

## Okay, so what is this then?

This project, `twitter-url-regexen`, is just an attempt to extract the

URL-related regular expressions from the `twitter-text-rb` source code

(specifically, [`lib/regex.rb`][5]) and port them to Python.  Nothing more,

nothing less.

## How good is this port?

Well, it passes 62 of the 70 (at time of writing) URL-extraction conformance

tests. Hopefully, that's good enough for government work (as they say).

## What about those 8 failing tests?

See, here's where things get even dumber. Twitter is not just extracting these

URLs based on a regular expression. There is also a fair amount of extra work

done to, e.g., specially handle t.co URLs, protocol-less ccTLD URLs, non-ASCII

URLs, etc.

This library does not attempt to duplicate that logic, so some of the failures

stem from that basic incompatibility.

Fuck if I know about the other ones.

## Running the tests

First, get the conformance tests:

    git submodule update --init

Make sure you have all of the requirements (`py.test` and `pyyaml`):

    pip install -r test_requirements.txt

Run the tests:

    py.test

If you'd like to test some alternate Python implentations

([twitter-text-python][6] and [twitter-text-py][7]) of the same idea,

you'll have to run those tests a little more manually:

    py.test tests/alt*

## See Also

Twitter's own docs about this inane misfeature:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tco-url-wrapper/how-twitter-wrap-urls

[1]: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-rb

[2]: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-js

[3]: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-java

[4]: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-conformance

[5]: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-rb/blob/master/lib/regex.rb

[6]: https://github.com/BonsaiDen/twitter-text-python

[7]: https://github.com/dryan/twitter-text-py