Project
Use the Twitter API to write the basic parts of a Twitter client. See what your friends are tweeting, get trending topics, search tweets, and more.
Goals
- Have fun playing with data from Twitter.
- See how easy it is to programmatically gather data from social websites that have APIs.
- Get experience with command line option parsing and passing data to a Python script.
- Get experience reading other people's code.
Project setup
Download and install the python-twitter
dependencies and library
- http://pypi.python.org/pypi/httplib2/
- http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson/
- http://pypi.python.org/pypi/oauth2/
- http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/
Download and un-archive the Twitter project skeleton code
Un-archiving will produce a Twitter
folder containing 3 python files: twitter_api.py
, twitter_functions.py
, and util.py
.
Test your installation
From a command prompt, navigate to the Twitter
directory and run
python twitter_api.py --search=python
You should see the text from 20 tweets containing the word "Python" printed to the screen. If you don't, let a staff member know so you can debug this together.
Project steps
1. Read through and understand search
- Run
python twitter_api.py --search
with various search terms, e.g.python twitter_api.py --search=Python
python twitter_api.py --search="Red Sox"
- Read through the
search
function intwitter_functions.py
. - Trace through the logic in
twitter_api.py
that turns the--search
command line option into a call tosearch
.
Check your understanding: What does api.GetSearch
return?
2. Read through and understand trendingTopics
- Run
python twitter_api.py --trending-topics
- Read through the
trendingTopics
function intwitter_functions.py
. - Trace through the logic in
twitter_api.py
that turns the--trending-topics
command line option into a call tosearch
.
Check your understanding: What are the differences between the optparse
logic for --search
and --trending-topics
?
3. Implement userTweets
- Using the
search
andtrendingTopics
functions as a reference, implementuserTweets
intwitter_functions.py
.
This function should print recent tweets by the username provided on the command line.
You may find the twitter.Api()
function GetUserTimeline()
helpful.
To test this function, at the command line run
python twitter_api.py -u <username>
For example,
python twitter_api.py -u bostonpython
4. Implement trendingTweets
- Using the
search
andtrendingTopics
functions as a reference, implementtrendingTweets
intwitter_functions.py
.
Bonus material
-
Customize how tweets are displayed. Look at the
Status
andUser
classes in the Twitter code for inspiration; options include the URL for the tweet, how many followers the sender has, the location of the sender, and if it was a retweet. - [Long] A lot of the Twitter API requires that you be authenticated. Examples of actions that require authentication include: posting new tweets, getting a user's followers, getting private tweets from your friends, and following new people. Set up oAuth so you can make authenticated requests. http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth describe how Twitter uses oAuth. http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/ has examples of using oAuth authentication to make authenticated Twitter API requests.