Getting only selected fields of user timeline from Twitter API - twitter

Question

I am getting user's timeline from an iOS app, with a big number of tweets being pulled from the API. I am using the statuses/user_timeline endpoint to get the data, however, as I'm on a mobile device and as I only need the tweet text only, I'd like to filter only the actual text data of the tweets. I've already set include_entities to no and trim_user to true, but even with entities and user data trimmed off, I'm still getting a lot of data that I don't need. Here is a sample tweet that I get from the endpoint:
{
"created_at": "Tue Nov 27 14:13:13 +0000 2012",
"id": 273429272209801200,
"id_str": "273429272209801217",
"text": "you could list #5ThingsIFindAttractive but you can actually find them on Facebook with Social Match on iPhone! http://t.co/zRr1ggbz",
"source": "web",
"truncated": false,
"in_reply_to_status_id": null,
"in_reply_to_status_id_str": null,
"in_reply_to_user_id": null,
"in_reply_to_user_id_str": null,
"in_reply_to_screen_name": null,
"user": {
"id": 62828168,
"id_str": "62828168"
},
"geo": null,
"coordinates": null,
"place": {
"id": "682c5a667856ef42",
"url": "http://api.twitter.com/1/geo/id/682c5a667856ef42.json",
"place_type": "country",
"name": "Turkey",
"full_name": "Turkey",
"country_code": "TR",
"country": "Turkey",
"bounding_box": {
"type": "Polygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
25.663883,
35.817497
],
[
44.822762,
35.817497
],
[
44.822762,
42.109993
],
[
25.663883,
42.109993
]
]
]
},
"attributes": {}
},
"contributors": null,
"retweet_count": 0,
"favorited": false,
"retweeted": false,
"possibly_sensitive": false
}
The only thing I actually need is the text key of the dictionary. The rest is currently useless for my app. I'll be requesting LOTS of tweets like this. How can I send a request to just to pull of the text key of the tweets? Currently, this method is extremely inefficient.

Answer 1

You can't. The best you can do is set up a proxy which will request the data, strip it back, and then forward it to the mobile.
If it's any consolation, the JSON will be gzip'd and so should still be relatively small - so won't take too long to transfer or eat in to the user's data allowance.