Katy Perry's latest 140 character tweet is 3822 characters if you get the full response from Twitter's API ( https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json).
Does the Twitter API support partial responses / field masks so that we can only receive the data we care about?
The documentation lists a couple of options you can use.
trim_user=true will remove a bunch of data about the user. You'll still get some other metadata as well.
count=1 will get you just the most recent tweet - nothing else.