Scripting Twitter with Python
9 April 2008
Twitter is a social networking service where users can write a sentence (maximum 140 characters) about themselves. It is similar to the mood in myspace or the status line in Facebook (Zeth is ... ), except that in Twitter it takes centre stage. It somewhat like sending your friends random SMS text messages but in a website format instead. Indeed you can even use Twitter with a phone if you really want to.
You can choose to let the general public to view your 'updates', or decide to only grant access to those who have become your "friends". Here is my new Twitter page. I am still thinking about how open/closed I should be about it.
When discussing it on IRC, Andy asked me what it offers over other social networking sites, and having used Twitter for only one day I am not sure I have a good answer. However, it is fun while it lasts, at least until we all get bored and just move along to the next one (for more see my prediction that social networking will eventually just become a protocol).
One fun thing about Twitter is that is has an open API with all kinds of language bindings that people have written for it.
DeWitt Clinton's last Twitter entry is "Just spent $65 to register TextMate. 20 minutes later, back to emacs". Hilarious! Especially since I am now writing this very post in Emacs.
DeWitt has also written Python bindings for the Twitter API, available from the Cheeseshop.
This has lots of potential, you can take your info out of Twitter and feed them into another service or other software, and visa-versa. In this post, we will just focus on Twitter, and getting the information in and out of Twitter using Python.
If you want to test it out yourself along with me, go grab the Python module, get yourself a Twitter account, and then type (or copy and paste) the commands into the Python interpreter (start Python by typing python into the terminal).
# Lets start by importing the Twitter API Python bindings:
import twitter
# New lets login with your username and password.
# Don't forget to change them to your details!
api = twitter.Api(username='zeth0', password='lenna')
# Lets printout the timeline
for i in api.GetFriendsTimeline():
print i.relative_created_at, "|", i.user.name, "|", i.text
# Lets print out only the last status message for each of our
friends:
for u in api.GetFriends():
print u.GetStatus().relative_created_at, "|", u.name, "|" ,\
u.GetStatus().text
# Lets print the replies to our own posts:
for i in api.GetReplies():
print i.relative_created_at, "|", i.user.name, "|", i.text
# Lets print out the personal messages that we have been sent
for i in api.GetDirectMessages():
print i.created_at, "|", i.sender_screen_name, "|", i.text
# Lets create a new update
api.PostUpdate("""I just read an interesting post about using the
Python programming language and Twitter at Command Line Warriors
- http://commandline.org.uk/ - cooler than salmon on a stick.""")
# Lets make a new friend
api.CreateFriendship('zeth0')
Pretty cool! In a future post, we will connect it to other software. Bye for now.
1 dbr says...
I was looking for a simple script to post to Twitter, but all the API's were large, complex and had dependancies. When I stopped being lazy and actually looked at the Twitter API documentation, it is very simple.. Basically a HTTP post with status:your%20message (and it needs your username/password, of course)
The simple post-to-twitter module I wrote is.. 20 lines, with doc-strings, and only needs urllib:
It does nothing but post status-updates, so no pulling data in - but most of the code is there.. The only ~difficult thing would be parsing the XML (And beautifulSoup makes this much simpler)
Posted at 9:49 a.m. on April 10, 2008