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

You're getting 401 response, which means "Unauthorized." (see HTTP status codes)

Your code looks good. Using api.user_timeline(screen_name="some_screen_name") works for me in the old example I have lying around.

I'm guessing you either need to authorize the app, or there is some problem with your OAuth setup.

Maybe you found this already, but here is the short code example that I started from: https://github.com/nloadholtes/tweepy/blob/nloadholtes-examples/examples/oauth.py

Answer 2

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.