Retweeting In Java

Earlier I posted examples of how to log into Twitter and post a tweet using the twitter4j library. Now here’s a function demonstrating how to retweet a post.

This function is entirely self-contained; all it requires is a global variable twitter, which represents a twitter4j.Twitter object preconfigured with the proper authentication details.

public void doRetweet() {
    /**
     * To demonstrate retweeting, we'll search Twitter for all tweets that contain 
     * the phrase "mail not working" (including quotation marks). We'll then select 
     * a random tweet, and retweet it into our stream.
     */
    try {
        //Search for tweets, then pull out a list of those tweets.
        //A Status is how twitter4j refers to an individual tweet.
        twitter4j.Query q = new twitter4j.Query("\"mail not working\"");
        q.count(100);
        List<Status> results = twitter.search(q).getTweets();
        //Randomly select a tweet
        Random generator = new Random();
        int pick = generator.nextInt(results.size());
        Status status_to_retweet = results.get(pick);
        //Log the tweet we're retweeting
        System.out.println("Now retweeting: " + status_to_retweet.toString());
        //And finally retweet that tweet
        long status_id = status_to_retweet.getId();
        twitter.retweetStatus(status_id);
    }
    catch (TwitterException e) {
        System.err.println("A TwitterException has occurred while attempting to retweet. Exception message: " + e.getMessage());
    }
}//end function