Rules and filtering: Enterprise

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 Grouping is especially important where a single rule combines AND and OR functionality, due to the order of operations used to evaluate the rule. See below for more details.

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 ipad would be evaluated as apple OR (iphone ipad)
ipad iphone OR android would 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) ipad
iphone (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 Diacr**í**tica or hashtag #cumplea**ñ**os 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.

Keywords
Phrases
Proximity
#hashtags
@mentions
$cashtags
url:
url_contains:
has:links
has:mentions
has:hashtags
has:media
has:symbols
is:quote
is:reply

Enterprise operators

Below are the operators available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack. A subset of these are available with the 30-Day and Full-Archive search APIs. See this table for a product-by-product list of available operators.

Operator	Description
keyword	Matches a keyword within the text body or URL of a Post. Keywords must start with either a digit (0-9) or any non-punctuation character. Keyword matching is tokenized, meaning the keyword is matched against tokenized text of the Post body. For strings with punctuation (e.g., “coca-cola”), use a quoted “exact phrase match”. Example: `(social OR pizza OR wildfire) -planet`
emoji	Matches an emoji within the body of a Post, using tokenized matching based on punctuation, symbol/emoji, and separator characters. If an emoji has a variant, use quotes for exact matches. Example: `(🍕 OR 💜 OR 🐢) -🤖`
”exact phrase match”	Matches an exact phrase within the body of a Post. Punctuation is treated as whitespace. Example: `("social media" OR "developer.x.com" OR "wildfire911" OR "coca-cola") -"planet earth"`
#	Matches any Post with the specified hashtag. This is an exact match, meaning `#2016` will match posts with `#2016` but not `#2016election`. Example: `(#social OR #pizza OR #2016election) -#planet`
@	Matches any Post mentioning the specified username. Example: `(@XDevelopers OR @api OR @twittereng) -@jack`
”keyword1 keyword2”~N	Proximity operator that matches a Post where keywords are within N tokens of each other. Keywords in reverse order can be no more than N-2 tokens apart. N cannot be greater than 6. Example: `"social media"~5 OR "API"~3`
contains:	Substring match for Posts with the specified substring in the body, regardless of tokenization. Use double quotes for substrings with whitespace or punctuation. Example: `(contains:social OR contains:"wikipedia.com") -contains:"buy now"`
from:	Matches any Post from a specific user by X numeric Account ID or username (excluding `@`). Example: `(from:2244994945 OR from:api OR from:twittereng) -from:jack`
to:	Matches any Post replying to a specific user by X numeric Account ID or username (excluding `@`). Example: `(to:2244994945 OR to:api OR to:twittereng) -to:jack`
url:	Performs a tokenized (keyword/phrase) match on expanded URLs of a post. Example: `@XDevelopers url:"developer.x.com"`
url_title:	Performs a keyword/phrase match on the expanded URL HTML title metadata. Available only with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
url_description:	Performs a keyword/phrase match on the expanded page description metadata. Available only with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
url_contains:	Matches Posts with URLs containing the specified phrase or keyword. Enclose search terms with punctuation in quotes. Example: `(url_contains:"developer.x.com" OR url_contains:wildfire) -url_contains:reddit`
bio:	Matches a keyword or phrase within the user bio of a Post. This is a tokenized match within the ‘description’ field within the User object. Example: `(bio:engineer OR bio:"wordpress.com" OR bio:🚀) -bio:troll` Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
bio_name:	Matches a keyword within the user bio name of a Post. This is a tokenized match within a user’s “name” field in the User object. Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
bio_location:	Matches Posts where the User object’s location contains the specified keyword or phrase. This operator performs a tokenized match, similar to the normal keyword rules on the message body. This location is part of the User object, and is the account’s ‘home’ location. Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
statuses_count:	Matches Posts when the author has posted a number of statuses within the given range. If a single number is specified, any number equal to or higher will match. A range can be specified to match any number in the range (e.g., `statuses_count:1000..10000`). Example: `to:api statuses_count:10` Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
followers_count:	Matches Posts when the author has a followers count within the given range. If a single number is specified, any number equal to or higher will match. A range can be specified to match any number in the range (e.g., `followers_count:1000..10000`). Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
friends_count:	Matches Posts when the author has a friends count (the number of users they follow) within the given range. If a single number is specified, any number equal to or higher will match. A range can be specified to match any number in the range (e.g., `friends_count:1000..10000`). Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
listed_count:	Matches Posts when the author has been listed within X a certain number of times within the given range. If a single number is specified, any number equal to or higher will match. A range can be specified to match any number in the range (e.g., `listed_count:10..100`). Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
$	Matches any Post that contains the specified ‘cashtag’ entity. Example: `($TWTR OR $TSLA OR $BRK.A) -$F` Note: The cashtag operator relies on X’s ‘symbols’ entity extraction to match cashtags, rather than extracting it from the body itself.
retweets_of:	Matches Posts that are Retweets of a specified user. Accepts both usernames and numeric X Account IDs (NOT Post status IDs). Example: `(retweets_of:2244994945 OR retweets_of:api OR retweets_of:twittereng) -retweets_of:jack`
retweets_of_status_id:	Deliver only explicit Retweets of the specified Post. Use the ID of an original Post and not a Retweet. Example: `retweets_of_status_id:1293593516040269825` Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
in_reply_to_status_id:	Deliver only explicit replies to the specified Post. Example: `in_reply_to_status_id:1293593516040269825` Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
sample:	Returns a random sample of Posts that match a rule. The sample percentage must be an integer between 1 and 100. The operator reduces the scope to X%, then the rule/filter is applied to that sampled subset. Example: `#happybirthday sample:5` `"happy birthday"~5 sample:80` Note: Only available with PowerTrack and Historical PowerTrack.
source:	Matches any Post generated by the specified source application. The value can be the application name or the application’s URL. Example: `#happybirthday source:"X for iPhone"` `"This is a test X from my TestingApp" source:MyTestAppName` Note: The source operator searches on the Post source attribute and cannot be used alone.
lang:	Matches Posts classified by X as being in a particular language. Posts are currently classified as only one language, so matching multiple languages yields no results. Not recommended to use alone.

The list below represents the current supported languages and their corresponding BCP 47 language indentifier:


Amharic: am	German: de	Malayalam: ml	Slovak: sk
Arabic: ar	Greek: el	Maldivian: dv	Slovenian: sl
Armenian: hy	Gujarati: gu	Marathi: mr	Sorani Kurdish: ckb
Basque: eu	Haitian Creole: ht	Nepali: ne	Spanish: es
Bengali: bn	Hebrew: iw	Norwegian: no	Swedish: sv
Bosnian: bs	Hindi: hi	Oriya: or	Tagalog: tl
Bulgarian: bg	Latinized Hindi: hi-Latn	Panjabi: pa	Tamil: ta
Burmese: my	Hungarian: hu	Pashto: ps	Telugu: te
Croatian: hr	Icelandic: is	Persian: fa	Thai: th
Catalan: ca	Indonesian: in	Polish: pl	Tibetan: bo
Czech: cs	Italian: it	Portuguese: pt	Traditional Chinese: zh-TW
Danish: da	Japanese: ja	Romanian: ro	Turkish: tr
Dutch: nl	Kannada: kn	Russian: ru	Ukrainian: uk
English: en	Khmer: km	Serbian: sr	Urdu: ur
Estonian: et	Korean: ko	Simplified Chinese: zh-CN	Uyghur: ug
Finnish: fi	Lao: lo	Sindhi: sd	Vietnamese: vi
French: fr	Latvian: lv	Sinhala: si	Welsh: cy
Georgian: ka	Lithuanian: lt

Example:

(@XDevelopers OR to:XDevelopers) lang:es

Note: The language operator matches on the specific Post language determined by X and set as the lang Post attribute. See HERE for more information on X Entities JSON attributes. If no language classification can be made for a Post, the Post lang will be set as ‘und’ (for undefined).

Operator	Description
place	Matches Posts tagged with the specified location or X place ID. Multi-word place names should be enclosed in quotes. Example: `(place:London OR place:"Great Britain") -place:USA` `place:fd70c22040963ac7` Note: See the GET geo/search public API endpoint for how to obtain X place IDs. Note: Will not match on Retweets or Quote Tweets, as Retweet places are attached to the original Post.
place_country	Matches Posts where the country code associated with a tagged place/location matches the given ISO alpha-2 character code. Example: `place_country:GB OR place_country:AU OR place_country:CA` Note: Will not match on Retweets or Quote Tweets, as Retweet places are attached to the original Post. Valid ISO codes: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.
point_radius:[lon lat radius]	Matches against the Exact Location (x,y) of the Post or a “Place” geo polygon within the defined radius. * Radius: < 25mi * Supported units: mi, km * Longitude: ±180 * Latitude: ±90 Coordinates are in decimal degrees. Arguments are bracketed, space-delimited. Example: `point_radius:[-105.27346517 40.01924738 0.5mi]` Example: `point_radius:[2.355128 48.861118 16km]` Note: Will not match on Retweets or Quote Tweets.
bounding_box:[west_long south_lat east_long north_lat]	Matches against Exact Location or a “Place” geo polygon fully contained in a bounding box. Arguments are bracketed, space-delimited. Coordinates: decimal degrees (±180 long, ±90 lat). Width and height must be < 25mi. Example: `bounding_box:[-105.301758 39.964069 -105.178505 40.09455]` Note: Will not match on Retweets or Quote Tweets.
profile_country	Matches Posts where the author’s profile geo country code matches a given ISO-3166-1-alpha-2 two-letter code.
profile_region	Matches on the “region” field from the author’s profile geo enrichment, an exact full string match. Use double quotes for substrings containing whitespace or punctuation. Example: `profile_region:"New York"`
profile_locality	Matches on the “locality” field from the author’s profile geo enrichment, an exact full string match. Use double quotes for substrings containing whitespace or punctuation. Example: `profile_locality:"San Francisco"`
profile_subregion	Matches on the “subRegion” field from the author’s profile geo enrichment, including specific counties or metro areas. An exact full string match. Example: `profile_subregion:"Santa Clara County"`
has:geo	Matches Posts with Post-specific geo location data from X, including “geo” lat-long or “Place” location data with a display name and geo polygon. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:profile_geo	Matches Posts with any Profile Geo metadata, regardless of value. Available alias: `has:derived_user_geo`. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:links	Matches Posts with a link or referenced media in the “text” object of the payload, including media and Quote Tweets. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
is:retweet	Delivers only explicit retweets. Can be negated to exclude retweets and deliver only original content. This operator looks only for true Retweets and not Quoted Tweets. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
is:reply	Delivers only explicit replies. Can be negated to exclude replies. PowerTrack matches replies to original Posts, replies in quoted Posts, and replies in Retweets. Search API matches only replies to original Posts. Example: `@XDevelopers -is:reply`
is:quote	Delivers only Quote Tweets or Posts that reference another Post. Can be negated to exclude Quote Tweets. Example: `@XDevelopers is:quote`
is:verified	Delivers only Posts from “verified” authors. Can be negated to exclude Posts from verified authors. Example: `@XDevelopers is:verified`
has:mentions	Matches Posts mentioning another X user. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:hashtags	Matches Posts containing a hashtag. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:media	Matches Posts containing a media url classified by X (e.g., pic.x.com). Available alias: `has:media_link`. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:images	Matches Posts containing a media url (e.g., pic.x.com). Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:videos	Matches Posts containing native X videos uploaded to X. Available alias: `has:video_link`. This operator does not match videos from YouTube, Periscope, or other video hosting sites. Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.
has:symbols	Matches Posts containing a cashtag symbol (e.g., $TWTR). Note: With Search API, must be combined with non-`is:` or `has:` operators.

Operators by product