README

   1 Python Twitter Tools
   2 ====================
   3
   4 The Minimalist Twitter API for Python is a Python API for Twitter,
   5 everyone's favorite Web 2.0 Facebook-style status updater for people
   6 on the go.
   7
   8 Also included is a twitter command-line tool for getting your friends'
   9 tweets and setting your own tweet from the safety and security of your
  10 favorite shell and an IRC bot that can announce Twitter updates to an
  11 IRC channel.
  12
  13 For more information, after installing the `twitter` package:
  14
  15  * import the `twitter` package and run help() on it
  16  * run `twitter -h` for command-line tool help
  17
  18
  19 twitter - The Command-Line Tool
  20 -------------------------------
  21
  22 The command-line tool lets you do some awesome things:
  23
  24  * view your tweets, recent replies, and tweets in lists
  25  * view the public timeline
  26  * follow and unfollow (leave) friends
  27  * various output formats for tweet information
  28
  29 The bottom line: type `twitter`, receive tweets.
  30
  31
  32
  33 twitterbot - The IRC Bot
  34 ------------------------
  35
  36 The IRC bot is associated with a twitter account (either your own account or an
  37 account you create for the bot). The bot announces all tweets from friends
  38 it is following. It can be made to follow or leave friends through IRC /msg
  39 commands.
  40
  41
  42 twitter-log
  43 -----------
  44
  45 `twitter-log` is a simple command-line tool that dumps all public
  46 tweets from a given user in a simple text format. It is useful to get
  47 a complete offsite backup of all your tweets. Run `twitter-log` and
  48 read the instructions.
  49
  50 twitter-archiver and twitter-follow
  51 -----------------------------------
  52
  53 twitter-archiver will log all the tweets posted by any user since they
  54 started posting. twitter-follow will print a list of all of all the
  55 followers of a user (or all the users that user follows).
  56
  57
  58 Programming with the Twitter api classes
  59 ========================================
  60
  61
  62 The Twitter and TwitterStream classes are the key to building your own
  63 Twitter-enabled applications.
  64
  65
  66 The Twitter class
  67 -----------------
  68
  69 The minimalist yet fully featured Twitter API class.
  70
  71 Get RESTful data by accessing members of this class. The result
  72 is decoded python objects (lists and dicts).
  73
  74 The Twitter API is documented at:
  75
  76   http://dev.twitter.com/doc
  77
  78
  79 Examples::
  80
  81     from twitter import *
  82
  83     # see "Authentication" section below for tokens and keys
  84     t = Twitter(
  85                 auth=OAuth(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_SECRET,
  86                            CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
  87                )
  88
  89     # Get your "home" timeline
  90     t.statuses.home_timeline()
  91
  92     # Get a particular friend's timeline
  93     t.statuses.friends_timeline(id="billybob")
  94
  95     # Also supported (but totally weird)
  96     t.statuses.friends_timeline.billybob()
  97
  98     # Update your status
  99     t.statuses.update(
 100         status="Using @sixohsix's sweet Python Twitter Tools.")
 101
 102     # Send a direct message
 103     t.direct_messages.new(
 104         user="billybob",
 105         text="I think yer swell!")
 106
 107     # Get the members of tamtar's list "Things That Are Rad"
 108     t._("tamtar")._("things-that-are-rad").members()
 109
 110     # Note how the magic `_` method can be used to insert data
 111     # into the middle of a call. You can also use replacement:
 112     t.user.list.members(user="tamtar", list="things-that-are-rad")
 113
 114     # An *optional* `_timeout` parameter can also be used for API
 115     # calls which take much more time than normal or twitter stops
 116     # responding for some reasone
 117     t.users.lookup(screen_name=','.join(A_LIST_OF_100_SCREEN_NAMES), _timeout=1)
 118
 119
 120 Searching Twitter::
 121
 122     # Search for the latest tweets about #pycon
 123     t.search.tweets(q="#pycon")
 124
 125
 126 Using the data returned
 127 -----------------------
 128
 129 Twitter API calls return decoded JSON. This is converted into
 130 a bunch of Python lists, dicts, ints, and strings. For example::
 131
 132     x = twitter.statuses.home_timeline()
 133
 134     # The first 'tweet' in the timeline
 135     x[0]
 136
 137     # The screen name of the user who wrote the first 'tweet'
 138     x[0]['user']['screen_name']
 139
 140
 141 Getting raw XML data
 142 --------------------
 143
 144 If you prefer to get your Twitter data in XML format, pass
 145 format="xml" to the Twitter object when you instantiate it::
 146
 147     twitter = Twitter(format="xml")
 148
 149 The output will not be parsed in any way. It will be a raw string
 150 of XML.
 151
 152
 153 The TwitterStream class
 154 -----------------------
 155
 156 The TwitterStream object is an interface to the Twitter Stream API
 157 (stream.twitter.com). This can be used pretty much the same as the
 158 Twitter class except the result of calling a method will be an
 159 iterator that yields objects decoded from the stream. For
 160 example::
 161
 162     twitter_stream = TwitterStream(auth=UserPassAuth('joe', 'joespassword'))
 163     iterator = twitter_stream.statuses.sample()
 164
 165     for tweet in iterator:
 166         ...do something with this tweet...
 167
 168 The iterator will yield tweets forever and ever (until the stream
 169 breaks at which point it raises a TwitterHTTPError.)
 170
 171 The `block` parameter controls if the stream is blocking. Default
 172 is blocking (True). When set to False, the iterator will
 173 occasionally yield None when there is no available message.
 174
 175 Twitter Response Objects
 176 ------------------------
 177
 178 Response from a twitter request. Behaves like a list or a string
 179 (depending on requested format) but it has a few other interesting
 180 attributes.
 181
 182 `headers` gives you access to the response headers as an
 183 httplib.HTTPHeaders instance. You can do
 184 `response.headers.getheader('h')` to retrieve a header.
 185
 186 Authentication
 187 --------------
 188
 189 You can authenticate with Twitter in three ways: NoAuth, OAuth, or
 190 UserPassAuth. Get help() on these classes to learn how to use them.
 191
 192 OAuth is probably the most useful.
 193
 194
 195 Working with OAuth
 196 ------------------
 197
 198 Visit the Twitter developer page and create a new application:
 199
 200     https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
 201
 202 This will get you a CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.
 203
 204 When users run your application they have to authenticate your app
 205 with their Twitter account. A few HTTP calls to twitter are required
 206 to do this. Please see the twitter.oauth_dance module to see how this
 207 is done. If you are making a command-line app, you can use the
 208 oauth_dance() function directly.
 209
 210 Performing the "oauth dance" gets you an ouath token and oauth secret
 211 that authenticate the user with Twitter. You should save these for
 212 later so that the user doesn't have to do the oauth dance again.
 213
 214 read_token_file and write_token_file are utility methods to read and
 215 write OAuth token and secret key values. The values are stored as
 216 strings in the file. Not terribly exciting.
 217
 218 Finally, you can use the OAuth authenticator to connect to Twitter. In
 219 code it all goes like this::
 220
 221     from twitter import *
 222
 223     MY_TWITTER_CREDS = os.path.expanduser('~/.my_app_credentials')
 224     if not os.path.exists(MY_TWITTER_CREDS):
 225         oauth_dance("My App Name", CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
 226                     MY_TWITTER_CREDS)
 227
 228     oauth_token, oauth_secret = read_token_file(MY_TWITTER_CREDS)
 229
 230     twitter = Twitter(auth=OAuth(
 231         oauth_token, oauth_secret, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET))
 232
 233     # Now work with Twitter
 234     twitter.statuses.update('Hello, world!')
 235
 236
 237
 238 License
 239 =======
 240
 241 Python Twitter Tools are released under an MIT License.