Error n tweets were requested but the API can only return 0

Question

I am unable to retrieve any tweets using twitteR package in R. For example this request:

nbahash_tweets = searchTwitter("#nba",since='2013-01-01', until='2014-02-25',n=20)

Shows me this warning message:

Warning message: In doRppAPICall("search/tweets", n, params = params, retryOnRateLimit = retryOnRateLimit, : 20 tweets were requested but the API can only return 0

What could be the reason of the problem?

Solution 1

From the official Twitter Search API documentation

https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/search

The Twitter Search API searches against a sampling of recent Tweets published in the past 7 days.

so you can't search the API for tweets from 2013 - 2014

Solution 2

I also received this message when I was attempting to use the twitteR package to search Twitter-which brought me to this post. However, when I used the search_twitter_and_store command in the same package I was able to retrieve 1702 messages and store them in MySQL. Not exactly what I was shooting for but it did allow me to get and manipulate the data. Might work for you too.