Month: March 2022

This is part three of my series on using Python to connect to the Twitter API.

Imagine for a moment that you had a specific vision for your Twitter account.  A vision of balance, and harmony.  What if you only followed people who also followed you?  Whether or not you want to curate your Twitter experience in this transactional way is entirely up to you. It’s your account!

We can do that with Python. As always, replace the placeholders with your own account credentials.  See Part One of this series if you’re not sure how to do that. 

Let’s take a look at the code required to do this:

 import tweepy

consumerKey = "<>"
consumerSecret = "<>"
accessToken = "<>"
accessTokenSecret = "<>"

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumerKey, consumerSecret)
auth.set_access_token(accessToken, accessTokenSecret)

#Call the api 
api = tweepy.API(auth,wait_on_rate_limit=True)

#define two empty lists
followers = []
following = []
  
#Get the list of friends
for status in tweepy.Cursor(api.get_friends,count=200).items():
    #Add the results to the list
    following.append(status.screen_name)

#get the list of followers
for status in tweepy.Cursor(api.get_followers,count=200).items():
    #Add the results to the list
    followers.append(status.screen_name)
    
#compare the lists and take action
for person in following:
    if person not in followers:
        api.destroy_friendship(screen_name=person)
        print("Unfollowed " + person)

As

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Introduction

There are a great number of things that you might want to do with Twitter, for which the web or mobile clients don’t have facilities.  For example, you might want to run a script that automatically thanks anyone who follows you.  Or you might want to run a script that Likes any comment that someone adds to your post. 
It is worth noting that Twitter is extremely strict when it comes to automated actions around followers.  For example, it’s entirely possible to scrape the follower list of large accounts, and write a script to automatically follow all of those people. That would conceivably get you a large number of followers, and when you were done you could just write anther script to unfollow anyone who didn’t follow you back.   I promise that the Twitter API will pick up on what you’re doing, and put you in Twitter Jail.  Don’t do that.
In this post we’ll examine how to make a basic connection to the Twitter API, using Python and Tweepy.    We’ll investigate one of the errors you might encounter, and discuss the pagination of the results that the API returns. The example we’re using will return a list
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Introduction

A great deal of the available information regarding the use of Twitter and Python is outdated. The Twitter API has undergone several major revisions in the last few years, and many of the available tutorials now only lead to frustration.

Not only has the API undergone major revisions, but there are multiple supported versions of the API.  Some methods referenced by online tutorials will only work with certain other methods!

My hope for this series is to provide a clear and concise tutorial for connecting to the Twitter API using Tweepy and Python.

In order to connect to the Twitter API, your account must be provisioned for Developer access.  This is a free service, at the basic level, but does require additional setup.  That will be the focus of this first blog post.

Resources Required

You will need:

  • A Twitter account with a verified email address and verified phone number
  • Developer access to that account
  • A Python IDE (I use Spyder)
  • Tweepy

This post focuses solely on gaining Developer access, and assumes you already have the account.

The Setup

While I intend for this tutorial to be quite detailed, I trust that you can handle signing up for a

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