Mentions in replies are being counted towards 140-character limit

[obscyuriy]

This may not be the best place to post this, as this is in the UI, but seems to be the best option, of the categories available, and affects our use of the REST API endpoints.

In the extended tweet documentation, it says

When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count

but when I try to reply to someone through the UI, it immediately counts their username(s) towards the 140-character limit, as shown by the character count remaining - please see the attached screenshot.

[andypiper]

This change has not been rolled out yet. We have only enabled the attachment URL piece of the update. The replies changes are still forthcoming.

[obscyuriy]

thanks @andypiper. is there a scheduled release date for when this change (and are there any others?) will take effect? various media outlets reported September 19th as being the date.

since this isn’t live yet, I am looking at the sample payload Twitter has provided for a tweet > 140 characters with multiple mentions here.

In the outer “text” field, there is a link at the end - “https://t.co/YgpWiyojiR” - but in the “full_text” field in the “extended_tweet” object, this link is missing. How is this possible? Shouldn’t the “full_text” field include everything in the outer “text” field? And what is the relationship between the inner “entities” field in the “extended_tweet” object & the outer “entities” field at the root?

thanks!

[andypiper]

There is no announced date for the change and just because a media outlet announces something does not mean it is accurate I’ll try to dig into your other questions tomorrow.

[obscyuriy]

thanks, appreciate it.

I actually have a hypothesis, perhaps you can confirm/deny it. In the shortened form, the text field contains a link to the expanded URL. in the extended format of the same tweet, that link is nowhere to be found because it is, by definition, the extended format of the tweet.

to give you some more context - we are trying to create a method to convert from extended format to compatability+extended format - see this for more background. based on the above, it seems that there is no way to definitively replicate the same truncation process Twitter is doing on their end, right?

[andypiper]

I don’t believe there is any plan to document the algorithm behind the compatibility mode truncation. Apologies.

[obscyuriy]

no problem, and I understand that. Is my understanding of the presence of the link in the shortened version (and missing in the expanded version) correct?

[andypiper]

Yes exactly