How to find all 'retweet with comments' for a particular Tweet using API?

Question

I want to get all the 'retweets with comments' of a tweet.

Here are few things I noticed with twitter api

1. Retweets with comments are treated as tweets. The retweet count does not increase if you add a comment, also the twitter message is "XYZ quoted you instead retweeted you'
2. You clearly can't use this API endpoint https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/statuses/retweet/:id

Is there a way to find all the 'tweet/retweet with comment' if you can supply the original Tweet/Id?

Answer 1

So you're referring to Quoted Tweets (retweet with comments). There is no official method for that from the REST API yet, however, there are couple of ways to do it.

1. Since all quoted tweets contain the short url to the original one, you can still use in_reply_to_status_id and filter by short url of the original tweet
2. Search for tweets that contain the field quoted_status_id this can be done either through REST or STREAMING API.

quoted_status_id: This field only surfaces when the Tweet is a quote Tweet. This field contains the integer value Tweet ID of the quoted Tweet.

Answer 2

This isn't easy to accomplish. Here's the brute-force API method to find Quote Tweets.

Take your tweet id, it'll be something like 750176081987014657.

GET search/tweets

Use the Twitter API and search for the tweet.

https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/search/tweets

The GET request will look something like this:

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=750176081987014657&count=100

The q "query" argument is the tweet id. I've set the result count argument to the maximum (100).

Authorization

Of course with the Twitter API there's a whole bunch of tricky Authorization header work you have to do as well in order to complete the GET request. That's documented elsewhere and is beyond the scope of this answer.

Results and Conclusion

When you have the JSON results of this GET request, focus on the statuses collection. For each tweet in the collection (otherwise known as a "status"), check if it contains a quoted_status_id field. If it does, and the field value matches your tweet id, the tweet is a quote tweet. If it does not, it is simply a retweet with no added comment. You will also have to deal with iterating through the pagination of results if there are more than 100. That's done by looking for a search_metadata.next_results field and retrieving the next GET query string from it, which will be provided for you.