Code first, talk later.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
import tweepy #https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy
import unicodecsv
import sys
#Twitter API credentials
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""
def get_all_tweets(screen_name):
#Twitter only allows access to a users most recent 3240 tweets with this method
#authorize twitter, initialize tweepy
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)
#initialize a list to hold all the tweepy Tweets
alltweets = []
#make initial request for most recent tweets (200 is the maximum allowed count)
new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=200)
#save most recent tweets
alltweets.extend(new_tweets)
#save the id of the oldest tweet less one
oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1
#keep grabbing tweets until there are no tweets left to grab
while len(new_tweets) > 0:
print "getting tweets before %s" % (oldest)
#all subsiquent requests use the max_id param to prevent duplicates
new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=200,max_id=oldest)
#save most recent tweets
alltweets.extend(new_tweets)
#update the id of the oldest tweet less one
oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1
print "...%s tweets downloaded so far" % (len(alltweets))
#transform the tweepy tweets into a 2D array that will populate the csv
outtweets = [[tweet.id_str, tweet.created_at, tweet.text.encode('utf-8'), tweet.geo, tweet.source] for tweet in alltweets]
#write the csv
with open('%s_tweets.csv' % screen_name, 'wb') as f:
writer = unicodecsv.writer(f)
writer.writerow(["id","created_at","text","geo","source"])
writer.writerows(outtweets)
pass
if __name__ == '__main__':
#pass in the username of the account you want to download
get_all_tweets(sys.argv[1])
The entirety of this script doesn’t belong to me at all. My only
contribution is fixing utf-8 issues. Requires tweepy and unicodecsv.
Outputs tweets in a comma-delimited text file.
