tiktokr

The goal of tiktokr is to provide a scraper for the video-sharing social networking service TikTok. Mostly inspired by this Python module: davidteather/TikTok-Api. You will need Python 3.6 or higher to use tiktokr.

Many thanks go to Vivien Fabry for creating the hexagon logo.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("benjaminguinaudeau/tiktokr")

Load library

library(tiktokr)

Make sure to use your preferred Python installation

library(reticulate)

use_python(py_config()$python)

Install necessary Python libraries

tk_install()

Authentification

In November 2020, Tiktok increased its security protocol. They now frequently show a captcha, which is easily triggered after a few requests. This can be solved by specifying the cookie parameter. To get a cookie session:

Open a browser and go to “http://tiktok.com”
Scroll down a bit, to ensure, that you don’t get any captcha
Open the javascript console (in Chrome: View > Developer > Javascript Console)
Run document.cookie in the console. Copy the entire output (your cookie).
Run tk_auth() in R and paste the cookie.

Click on image below for screen recording of how to get your TikTok cookie:

The tk_auth function will save cookies (and user agent) as environment variable to your .Renviron file. You need to only run this once to use the tiktokr or whenever you want to update your cookie/user agent.

tk_auth(cookie = "<paste here the output from document.cookie>")

Examples

Every time before you run functions you need to initialize tiktokr

tk_init()

Get TikTok trends

Returns a tibble with trends.

# Trend
trends <- tk_posts(scope = "trends", n = 200)

Get TikToks from User

Note: User query often only provides 2k hits but limit is unclear. Sample seems to be from most recent to oldest.

user_posts <- tk_posts(scope = "user", query = "willsmith", n = 50)

Get TikToks from hashtag

Note: Hashtags query only provides 2k hits, which are not drawn randomly or based on the most recent post date but rather some mix of recent and popular TikToks.

hash_post <- tk_posts(scope = "hashtag", query = "maincharacter", n = 100)

Download TikTok Videos

With tk_dl_video you can download videos from TikTok.

From Trends:

trends <- tk_posts(scope = "trends", n = 5)

trends %>%
  split(1:nrow(.)) %>% 
  purrr::walk(~{tk_dl_video(.x$downloadAddr, paste0("video/", .x$id, ".mp4"))})

From hashtag:

hash_post <- tk_posts(scope = "hashtag", query = "maincharacter", n = 5)

hash_post %>%
  split(1:nrow(.)) %>% 
  purrr::walk(~{tk_dl_video(.x$downloadAddr, paste0("video/hashtag/", .x$id, ".mp4"))})

favstats / tiktokr