#1

Good day, I would like to know if search queries can use special characters/symbols. I have not been able to get them to work; I found in the documentation that I should use double quotes, but it still doesn’t work.
I am doing research into emoticons and emoji, and whereas emoji work fine, I have not yet succeeded in querying, for instance, :).
Thanks for your time. :)

#2

Unfortunately emoticons don’t work out in the API search, they are not matched.

#3

Well, this is weird! I just came across a paper by coincidence that claims to have done exactly this. I can’t link it, but it’s titled ‘Twitter as a Corpus for Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining’ and written by Alexander Pak and Patrick Paroubek.

#4

Sorry should clarify, emoji or unicode characters ARE matched - like 🤗 is a valid search keyword in the API, but emoticons like :) or :-P are not, :D would be indexed as D