Introduction¶
Minimal Python wrapper for Twitter’s REST and Streaming APIs
The principle behind TwitterAPI’s design is to provide a single method for accessing the Twitter API. You can call the request method with any endpoint found on Twitter’s developer site, the complete reference for all endpoints. The benefits of a single-method approach are: less code for me to maintain, and just a single method for you to learn. Here is a quck example:
from TwitterAPI import TwitterAPI
api = TwitterAPI(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token_key, access_token_secret)
r = api.request('search/tweets', {'q':'pizza'})
print r.status_code
If you want Twitter’s entire response as one long string, containing tweets in this example, you would use r.text. But, often an iterator is more useful:
for item in r.get_iterator():
print item['user']['screen_name'], item['text']
The iterator returns decoded JSON objects. What makes the iterator very powerful is it works with both REST API and Streaming API endpoints. No syntax changes required; just supply any endpoint and parameters that are found on Twitter’s dev site.
TwitterAPI is compatible with Python 2 and Python 3. It authenticates using either OAauth 1 or OAuth 2. It also supports web proxy server authentication. All with very little code change for you.