Searching for Tweets with Unicode Character / Apple Emoji?
Solution
As @Terence Eden points out, twitters REST search api doesn't work with emoji characters, but the streaming API does (as of Jan 2016).
There are a few tools out there for accessing twitters APIs in python. The one I've mostly used it `tweepy`. It can be installed with `pip`.
The tweepy docs on setting up the streaming api are quite easy to follow. The strings you filter on need to contain the actual emoji characters (e.g.: '').
Note that this searches for emojis as "words": that is, surrounded by white space. Something like "free" won't be found!
Problem
I am compiling a corpus of Tweets for sentiment analysis and am trying to grab Tweets with Apple Emoji characters. I have found the unicode character for one of the faces as: U+1F604 (U+D83D U+DE04), UTF-8: F0 9F 98 84 So far, I haven't been able to get any meaningful results. If I search `\ud83d\ude04` I'll get some Tweets back, but nothing useful. `\U0001f604` doesn't return anything on search. Is there any way for me to query Twitter for these characters? I am using the python-twitter wrapper for the API, but would be willing to use something else if a better alternative exists.