Getting started with enterprise rules and queries
Products utilizing enterprise operators deliver social data to you based on filtering rules you set up. Rules are made up of one or more ‘clauses’, where a clause is a keyword, exact phrase, or one of the many enterprise operators. Before beginning to build rules with enterprise operators, be sure to review the syntax described below, look through the list of available operators, and understand the restrictions around building rules. You should also be sure to understand the nuances of how rules are evaluated logically, in the "Order of operations" section.
Multiple clauses can be combined with both "and" and "or" logic.
Please note: "And" logic is specified with a space between clauses, while or logic is specified with an upper-case OR.
Each rule can be up to 2,048 characters long with no limits on the number of positive clauses (things you want to match or filter on) and negative clauses (things you want to exclude and not match on).
Building rules and queries
Keyword match
Keyword matches are similar to queries in a search interface. For example, the following enterprise operator rule would match activities with the term "social" in the text body.
social
ANDing terms with white space
Adding another keyword is the same as adding another requirement for finding matches. For example, this rule would only match activities where both "social" and "media" were present in the text, in either order – having a space between terms operates as boolean AND logic. If you include an explicit AND in your rule, it will rejected by the rules endpoint.
social media
ORing terms with upper-case OR
Many situations actually call for boolean OR logic, however. This is easily accomplished as well. Note that the OR operator must be upper-case and a lower-case ‘or’ will be treated as a regular keyword.
social OR data
Negating terms
Still other scenarios might call for excluding results with certain keywords (a boolean NOT logic). For instance, activities with ‘happy’, but excluding any with ‘birthday’ in the text.
social -personality
Grouping with parentheses
These types of logic can be combined using grouping with parentheses, and expanded to much more complex queries.
(social OR data) (academic OR research) -personality -information -university
This is just the beginning though – while the above examples rely simply on tokenized matching for keywords, enterprise products also offer operators to perform different types of matching on the text.
Exact match
"social media research"
Substring match
contains:info
Proximity match
"social media research"~3
Further, other operators allow you to filter on unique aspects of social data, besides just the text.
The user who is posting a Post
from:XDeveloeprs
Geo-tagged Tweets within 10 miles of Pearl St. in Boulder, CO, United States
point_radius:[-105.27346517 40.01924738 10.0mi]
Putting it all together
These can be combined with text filters using the same types of logic described above.
(social OR data) (academic OR research OR "social media research") point_radius:[-105.27346517 40.01924738 10.0mi] lang:en -personality -information -university
Boolean Syntax
The examples in the previous section, utilized various types of boolean logic and grouping. See the table below for additional detail regarding the syntax and requirements for each.
| Logic type | Operator syntax | Description |
|---|---|---|
| AND | social data | Whitespace between two operators results in AND logic between them Matches activities containing both keywords ("social", "data"). Do not use AND explicitly in your rule. Only use whitespace. An explicit AND will be treated like a regular keyword. |
| OR | social OR data | To OR together two operators, insert an all-caps OR, enclosed in whitespace between them Matches activities with EITHER keyword ("social" OR "data") Note that if you combine OR and AND functionality in a single rule, you should understand the order of operations described in our "Order of operations" section, and consider grouping non-negated operators together using parentheses as described below to ensure your rule behaves as expected. You must use upper-case "OR" in your rule. Lower-case 'or' will be treated as a regular keyword. |
| NOT | social data -apple -android -phone |
Insert a - character immediately in front of the operator or group of operators.The example rule shown matches activities containing keyword "social", but excludes those which contain the keyword "data." Negated ORs are not allowed where the rule would request "everything in the firehose except the negation." For example, apple OR -ipad is invalid because it would match all activities except those mentioning "ipad". |
| Grouping | (social OR data) -XDeveloeprs -api | Parentheses around multiple operators create a functional "group". Groups can be connected to clauses in the same manner as an individual clause via whitespace (AND) or ORs. However, note that it is a best practice to not group together negations by applying the negating - to the entire group. Instead, you should negate each individual operator, stringing them together via whitespace (AND). For example, instead of using -(iphone OR imac OR macbook), use the following: -iphone -imac -macbook |
Please note: that operators may be either positive or negative.
Positive Operators define what you want to include in the results. E.g. the has:hashtags operator says “I want activities containing hashtags.”
Negative Operators define what you want to exclude from the results, and are created by using the Boolean NOT logic described above. For example, -has:hashtags says “Exclude any activities containing hashtagss, even if they otherwise match my rule.”
Premum operator products have no restriction on the number of positive and negative clauses, subject to a maximum length of 2,048 characters.
Order of Operations
When combining AND and OR functionality in a single rule, the following order of operations will dictate how your rule is evaluated.
- Operators connected by AND logic are combined first
- Then, operators connected with OR logic are applied
Example:
apple OR iphone ipadwould be evaluated asapple OR (iphone ipad)ipad iphone OR androidwould be evaluated as(iphone ipad) OR android
To eliminate uncertainty and ensure that your rules are evaluated as intended, group terms together with parentheses where appropriate. For example:
(apple OR iphone) ipadiphone (ipad OR android)
Punctuation, Diacritics, and Case Sensitivity
If you specify a keyword or hashtag rule with character accents or diacritics for enterprise operators, it will match Post text honoring the diacritics (hashtags or keywords). Rule with a keyword Diacrítica or hashtag #cumpleaños will match "Diacrítica" or "#cumpleaños" but not "Diacritica" or "#cumpleanos" without the tilde í or eñe.
Characters with accents or diacritics are treated the same as normal characters and are not treated as word boundaries. For example, a rule of cumpleaños would only match activities containing the word cumpleaños and would not match activities containing cumplea, cumplean, or os.
All operators are evaluated in a case-insensitive manner. For example, the rule Cat will match all of the following: "cat", "CAT", "Cat".
PowerTrack rule tags
As described on our "Matching rules" page, each rule may be created with a tag. These tags have no effect on filtering, but can be used to create logical groupings of rules within your app. Each rule may have only one tag, with a maximum of 255 characters. Tags are included with the JSON formatted rule at the time of creation via the API, as described on our "Matching rules" page.
Putting Rules in JSON Format
In order to add or delete a rule from a stream via the API, the rules must utilize JSON format. Essentially, this requires putting each rule into the following structure:
{"value":"insert_rule_here"}
Rules with double-quotes
If the rule contains double-quote characters (“) associated with exact-match or other operators, they must be escaped using a backslash to distinguish them from the structure of the JSON format.
"social data" @XDevelopers
The JSON formatted rule would be:
{"value":"\"social data\" @XDevelopers"}
Rules with double-quote string literals
To include a double-quote character as a string literal within an exact-match, it must be double-escaped. For example, for a rule matching on the exact phrase "Toys “R” Us", including the double-quotes around "R", the plain-text representation of this would look like the following:
"Toys \"R\" Us"
Translating this to JSON format, you should use the following structure:
{"value":"\"Toys \\\"R\\\" Us\""}
Rules with Tags
To include an optional tag with your rule, as described above, simply include an additional tag field with the rule value.
{"value":"\"social data\" @XDevelopers","tag":"RULE-TAG-01"}
Formatting for API Requests
When adding or deleting rules from the stream via the API, multiple JSON formatted rules should be comma delimited, and wrapped in a JSON “rules” array, as shown below:
{"rules":[{"value":"from:XDevelopers"},{"value":"\social data\" @XDevelopers","tag":"RULE-TAG-01"}]}
Operators that match Quote Tweets
When using the PowerTrack API and Historical PowerTrack API, the operators below will match on content from both the original Post that was quoted and the new Quote Tweet.
However, if you are using the Search API, these operators will only match the contents of the Quote Tweet, and will not match on any content from the original Post that was quoted.
KeywordsPhrasesProximity#hashtags@mentions$cashtagsurl:url_contains:has:linkshas:mentionshas:hashtagshas:mediahas:symbolsis:quoteis:reply