Twitter: How to extract tweets containing symbols (!,%,$)?
You can create your own regular expression on the basis of your requirement and
then hit the twitter data to extract the specific tweets.
I found this interesting ressource : https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/92196/search-for-tweets-with-special-characters
It basically says that certain characters cannot be searched because Twitter has blocked their use.
I believe what you should do is search through all the tweets within the range of a certain scope, and then use the string method find on the body message of each tweet. You would then stop when you would have reached a certain run-time or a specific amount of tweets found.
You can download and store data from Twitter API using various criteria (search for words in a dictionary, location search, popular Twitter accounts etc) It won't be the whole data for sure but you will have some part of it.
Then search these tweets locally.
These characters are also valid in url's so strip out the url's before searching.
Also don't forget to check whether storing data you got from Twitter is legal.