How can I retrieve all Tweets and attributes for a given user using Python?

Question

I am attempting to retrieve data from Twitter, using Tweepy for a username typed at the command line. I\'m wanting to extract quite a bit of data about the status and user,s

Answer 1

If you're open to trying another library, you could give rauth a shot. There's already a Twitter example but if you're feeling lazy and just want a working example, here's how I'd modify that demo script:

from rauth import OAuth1Service

# Get a real consumer key & secret from https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
twitter = OAuth1Service(
    name='twitter',
    consumer_key='J8MoJG4bQ9gcmGh8H7XhMg',
    consumer_secret='7WAscbSy65GmiVOvMU5EBYn5z80fhQkcFWSLMJJu4',
    request_token_url='https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token',
    access_token_url='https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token',
    authorize_url='https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize',
    base_url='https://api.twitter.com/1/')

request_token, request_token_secret = twitter.get_request_token()

authorize_url = twitter.get_authorize_url(request_token)

print 'Visit this URL in your browser: ' + authorize_url
pin = raw_input('Enter PIN from browser: ')

session = twitter.get_auth_session(request_token,
                                   request_token_secret,
                                   method='POST',
                                   data={'oauth_verifier': pin})

params = {'screen_name': 'github',  # User to pull Tweets from
          'include_rts': 1,         # Include retweets
          'count': 10}              # 10 tweets

r = session.get('statuses/user_timeline.json', params=params)

for i, tweet in enumerate(r.json(), 1):
    handle = tweet['user']['screen_name'].encode('utf-8')
    text = tweet['text'].encode('utf-8')
    print '{0}. @{1} - {2}'.format(i, handle, text)

You can run this as-is, but be sure to update the credentials! These are meant for demo purposes only.

Full disclosure, I am the maintainer of rauth.