Twitter



''Note: as of July/August 2013, this page needs to be updated to reflect Twitter's switch to its 1.1 API. See this bug for updates. Sorry!''

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.

Download and install the dependencies and library
This project has 4 dependencies:,  ,  , and.

Install these as you typically install Python packages. For example, if you use, you can use the following   command:

pip install httplib2 simplejson oauth2 python-twitter

Download and un-archive the Twitter project skeleton code

 * http://web.mit.edu/jesstess/www/IntermediatePythonWorkshop/Twitter/Twitter.zip

Un-archiving will produce a  folder containing 3 python files: ,  , and.

Test your installation
From a command prompt, navigate to the  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.

1. Read through and understand

 * 1) Run   with various search terms, e.g.
 * 2) Read through the   function in.
 * 3) Trace through the logic in   that turns the   command line option into a call to.
 * 4) Find   in the Twitter library code at http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/source/browse/twitter.py. What other options could we have passed to  ?
 * 1) Trace through the logic in   that turns the   command line option into a call to.
 * 2) Find   in the Twitter library code at http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/source/browse/twitter.py. What other options could we have passed to  ?

Check your understanding: What does  return?

2. Read through and understand

 * 1) Run
 * 2) Read through the   function in.
 * 3) Trace through the logic in   that turns the   command line option into a call to.
 * 4) Find   in the Twitter library code at https://github.com/bear/python-twitter/blob/master/twitter.py. How many trending topics does that method return?

Check your understanding: What are the differences between the   logic for   and  ?

Step 2 resources:   The  module for parsing command-line options: http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html 

3. Implement
 Using the  and   functions as a reference, implement   in.

This function should print recent tweets by the username provided on the command line.

You may find the  function   helpful. We've already written some  logic for   in. Read through that logic. In what ways is it the same/different from the logic for ? Test your function. You can do this with:

python twitter_api.py -u

For example,

python twitter_api.py -u bostonpython 

You should see 20 tweets by the provided username. If you have a Twitter account, try running it on yourself, tweeting something new, and running it again! 

Check your understanding: What are the two ways to pass command line arguments for ?

4. Implement
 Using the  and   functions as a reference, implement   in.

This function should print a couple of recent tweets from each of the currently trending topics.

We've already written some  logic for   in. Read through that logic. In what ways is it the same/different from the logic for ? Test your function. You can do this with:

python twitter_api.py -w 

You should see recent tweets from all of the currently trending topics. Depending on how you implemented your function, you might see a chunk of tweets from each trending topic in turn, or tweets from each topic interleaved. </ol>

Check your understanding: What is the purpose of  in  ?

Bonus exercises
If you have time, try out some of these extra exercises.

1. Customize how tweets are printed by
The tweets printed by  could look much nicer and have more useful metadata!

Customize how tweets are displayed. Look at the  and   classes in https://github.com/bear/python-twitter/blob/master/twitter.py for inspiration; options include displaying:
 * the sender of the tweet
 * the URL for the tweet
 * how many followers the sender has
 * the location of the sender
 * if it was a retweet

and more!

2. Print trending topics by location
Extend  so that a Yahoo! Where On Earth ID (WOEID) can be specified on the command line and trending topics for that location will be displayed instead of using the hardcoded  to only display results for Boston.

You can look up WOEIDs by location at http://sigizmund.info/woeidinfo/

Congratulations!
You've read, modified, and added code to a software project that makes it easy to get useful information from Twitter. Keep practicing!