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Python Twitter Tools

The Minimalist Twitter API for Python is a Python API for Twitter, everyone's favorite Web 2.0 Facebook-style status updater for people on the go.

Also included is a twitter command-line tool for getting your friends' tweets and setting your own tweet from the safety and security of your favorite shell and an IRC bot that can announce Twitter updates to an IRC channel.

For more information, after installing the twitter package:

  • import the twitter package and run help() on it
  • run twitter -h for command-line tool help

twitter - The Command-Line Tool

The command-line tool lets you do some awesome things:

  • view your tweets, recent replies, and tweets in lists
  • view the public timeline
  • follow and unfollow (leave) friends
  • various output formats for tweet information

The bottom line: type twitter, receive tweets.

twitterbot - The IRC Bot

The IRC bot is associated with a twitter account (either your own account or an account you create for the bot). The bot announces all tweets from friends it is following. It can be made to follow or leave friends through IRC /msg commands.

twitter-log

twitter-log is a simple command-line tool that dumps all public tweets from a given user in a simple text format. It is useful to get a complete offsite backup of all your tweets. Run twitter-log and read the instructions.

twitter-archiver and twitter-follow

twitter-archiver will log all the tweets posted by any user since they started posting. twitter-follow will print a list of all of all the followers of a user (or all the users that user follows).

Programming with the Twitter api classes

The Twitter and TwitterStream classes are the key to building your own Twitter-enabled applications.

The Twitter class

The minimalist yet fully featured Twitter API class.

Get RESTful data by accessing members of this class. The result is decoded python objects (lists and dicts).

The Twitter API is documented at:

http://dev.twitter.com/doc

Examples::

from twitter import *

# see "Authentication" section below for tokens and keys
t = Twitter(
            auth=OAuth(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_SECRET,
                       CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
           )

# Get the public timeline
t.statuses.public_timeline()

# Get a particular friend's timeline
t.statuses.friends_timeline(id="billybob")

# Also supported (but totally weird)
t.statuses.friends_timeline.billybob()

# Update your status
t.statuses.update(
    status="Using @sixohsix's sweet Python Twitter Tools.")

# Send a direct message
t.direct_messages.new(
    user="billybob",
    text="I think yer swell!")

# Get the members of tamtar's list "Things That Are Rad"
t._("tamtar")._("things-that-are-rad").members()

# Note how the magic `_` method can be used to insert data
# into the middle of a call. You can also use replacement:
t.user.list.members(user="tamtar", list="things-that-are-rad")

# An *optional* `_timeout` parameter can also be used for API
# calls which take much more time than normal or twitter stops
# responding for some reasone
t.users.lookup(screen_name=','.join(A_LIST_OF_100_SCREEN_NAMES), _timeout=1)

Searching Twitter::

from twitter import *

twitter_search = Twitter(domain="search.twitter.com")

# Find the latest search trends
twitter_search.trends()

# Search for the latest News on #gaza
twitter_search.search(q="#gaza")

Using the data returned

Twitter API calls return decoded JSON. This is converted into a bunch of Python lists, dicts, ints, and strings. For example::

x = twitter.statuses.public_timeline()

# The first 'tweet' in the timeline
x[0]

# The screen name of the user who wrote the first 'tweet'
x[0]['user']['screen_name']

Getting raw XML data

If you prefer to get your Twitter data in XML format, pass format="xml" to the Twitter object when you instantiate it::

twitter = Twitter(format="xml")

The output will not be parsed in any way. It will be a raw string of XML.

The TwitterStream class

The TwitterStream object is an interface to the Twitter Stream API (stream.twitter.com). This can be used pretty much the same as the Twitter class except the result of calling a method will be an iterator that yields objects decoded from the stream. For example::

twitter_stream = TwitterStream(auth=UserPassAuth('joe', 'joespassword'))
iterator = twitter_stream.statuses.sample()

for tweet in iterator:
    ...do something with this tweet...

The iterator will yield tweets forever and ever (until the stream breaks at which point it raises a TwitterHTTPError.)

The block parameter controls if the stream is blocking. Default is blocking (True). When set to False, the iterator will occasionally yield None when there is no available message.

Twitter Response Objects

Response from a twitter request. Behaves like a list or a string (depending on requested format) but it has a few other interesting attributes.

headers gives you access to the response headers as an httplib.HTTPHeaders instance. You can do response.headers.getheader('h') to retrieve a header.

Authentication

You can authenticate with Twitter in three ways: NoAuth, OAuth, or UserPassAuth. Get help() on these classes to learn how to use them.

OAuth is probably the most useful.

Working with OAuth

Visit the Twitter developer page and create a new application:

https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new

This will get you a CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.

When users run your application they have to authenticate your app with their Twitter account. A few HTTP calls to twitter are required to do this. Please see the twitter.oauth_dance module to see how this is done. If you are making a command-line app, you can use the oauth_dance() function directly.

Performing the "oauth dance" gets you an ouath token and oauth secret that authenticate the user with Twitter. You should save these for later so that the user doesn't have to do the oauth dance again.

read_token_file and write_token_file are utility methods to read and write OAuth token and secret key values. The values are stored as strings in the file. Not terribly exciting.

Finally, you can use the OAuth authenticator to connect to Twitter. In code it all goes like this::

from twitter import *

MY_TWITTER_CREDS = os.path.expanduser('~/.my_app_credentials')
if not os.path.exists(MY_TWITTER_CREDS):
    oauth_dance("My App Name", CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
                MY_TWITTER_CREDS)

oauth_token, oauth_secret = read_token_file(MY_TWITTER_CREDS)

twitter = Twitter(auth=OAuth(
    oauth_token, oauth_secret, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET))

# Now work with Twitter
twitter.statuses.update('Hello, world!')

License

Python Twitter Tools are released under an MIT License.