How to vectorize/pipe through methods? - r

Question

I'm using twitteR to get the followers for a few handles. When fetching a single user, this code works:
test <- getUser("BarackObama")
test_friends <- test$getFriends(10) %>%
twListToDF() %>%
tibble::rownames_to_column() %>%
mutate(id = rowname) %>%
select(name, everything())
However, I'm not sure what's the cleanest way to iterate over a list of handles. The main obstacle I see at the moment is that I don't know how to pipe/vectorize over the getFriends() method (contra a getFriends() function). Plus, the object returned by getFriends() is not a DF, but has to be flattened (?) by twListToDF(), to then use rbind().
For looping, this is as far as I got:
handles <- c("BarackObama", "ThePresObama")
while (i < length(handles)) {
user <- getUser(handles[i])
friends <- user$getFriends() %>%
twListToDF()
}
With a bit more tinkering, I think I could get this to work, but I'm not sure if it's the best approach.

Answer 1

Alternatively, using rtweet, it seems like there is a more elegant solution that might accomplish your goal. It extracts the followers of specified users into a dataframe, looks up followers by user, then binds that result to the original dataframe using left_join so that you can distinguish which users correspond to which followers.
library(rtweet)
handles <- c("BarackObama", "ThePresObama")
handles.friends <- get_friends(handles)
handles.data <- lookup_users(handles.friends$user_id) %>%
left_join(handles.friends)
The pmap_* functions from purrr might also help implement a solution using the twitteR library, and have generally helped me to implement non-vectorized functions, but unfortunately I'm unable to get twitteR authentication working.