Search Twitter with a Regular Expression

Question

Is there a way to search the twitter api using a regular expressions? The expression I need to match is for a stock name.

/\$[a-zA-Z]{1,5}/

Answer 1

No, and as for the reason, you have to look at it from an architectural standpoint. Given the volume that Twitter has using the API, they would have to do the regex match against all possible tweets that are searchable. That is an insane amount of data processing.