CPEG 676-010, Fall 2017 (http://sec.prof.ninja/projects/)

© 2017 - 2020 Casey Campbell, Miguel Hernandez, and Benjamin Steenkamer. See LICENSE file for usage details.

Casey Campbell, Miguel Hernandez, and Benjamin Steenkamer.

(Due December 13th) (no red-team)
The task is to take in sample text and generate a tweet (280 characters) in the style of that text using Markov Chains. For super-extra credit consume a user name from Twitter and grab some tweets by the person as your source material.
Python 3 must be installed for the get_tweets.py script to run.
This API needs to be installed: sudo pip3 install tweepy
Twitter API keys from get_tweets.py have been purposely removed. You must provide your own!
Tested to work on Linux Mint 18.

To compile the program, type: make
This will produce an executable called markov_generator. Next you'll need to open up get_tweets.py. Inside this, you will need to provide API keys for the following variables: consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_key, and access_secret. These values come from https://apps.twitter.com/. You will need to create a Twitter account, create an new application entry, and then copy and paste the consumer and access keys provided by Twitter. Now the automatic tweet fetcher can be run. This program will work without these keys, but you will only be able to read from local text files.

To run the program, type ./markov_generator followed by the path to a text file or a Twitter user name. The Twitter user name must have the "@" symbol in front of it. Here are some examples:
./markov_generator textfiles/brady.txt
./markov_generator @user_name

If you give the program a text file, it will read each line as a new "tweet". Simply add a new line at the end of every sentence if you want the program to consider each line as a separate tweet. Shorter sentences/lines will cause the generator to create shorter tweets. Very long lines or sentences not ended with new a line will cause the generator to almost always create maximum length tweets (280 characters).

If you instead give the generator a twitter user name, the main program will call the get_tweets.py file. This file uses the Twitter API to get the last 200 tweets by a user. It then puts these tweets in a file called "textfiles/user-name-here.txt". The python script will then return control to the main program. The main program will open the newly created text file and use its contents to generate tweets.

Regardless of how the source text file is created, the program will generate 10 tweets and then ask you if you want to generate 10 more. If you select "no," the program will exit. The generator may create very short tweets by chance, and in most cases, the tweets will be gibberish.

http://www.bitsofpancake.com/programming/markov-chain-text-generator/
https://gist.github.com/yanofsky/5436496
http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2014/07/twitter-analytics/
http://docs.tweepy.org/en/v3.5.0/api.html