Python Twitter Tools
+====================
-The Minimalist Twitter API for Python is a Python API for Twitter, everyone's favorite Web 2.0 Facebook-style status updater for people on the go.
+The Minimalist Twitter API for Python is a Python API for Twitter,
+everyone's favorite Web 2.0 Facebook-style status updater for people
+on the go.
-Also included is a twitter command-line tool for getting your friends' tweets and setting your own tweet from the safety and security of your favorite shell and an IRC bot that can announce Twitter updated to an IRC channel.
+Also included is a twitter command-line tool for getting your friends'
+tweets and setting your own tweet from the safety and security of your
+favorite shell and an IRC bot that can announce Twitter updates to an
+IRC channel.
-For more information:
+For more information, after installing the `twitter` package:
* import the `twitter` package and run help() on it
* run `twitter -h` for command-line tool help
* run `twitterbot -h` for IRC bot help
+ * visit http://mike.verdone.ca/twitter for more info
+
+
+
+twitter - The Command-Line Tool
+-------------------------------
+
+The command-line tool currently supports the following things:
+
+ * view your friends' recent tweets
+ * view your recent replies
+ * view the public timeline
+ * follow and unfollow (leave) friends
+ * view tweets from lists
+ * various output formats for tweet information
+ * read your username and password from a config file
+
+The bottom line: type `twitter`, receive tweets.
+
+
+
+twitterbot - The IRC Bot
+------------------------
+
+The IRC bot is associated with a twitter account (either your own account or an
+account you create for the bot). The bot announces all tweets from friends
+it is following. It can be made to follow or leave friends through IRC /msg
+commands.
+
+
+twitter-log
+-----------
+
+`twitter-log` is a simple command-line tool that dumps all public
+tweets from a given user in a simple text format. It is useful to get
+a complete offsite backup of all your tweets. Run `twitter-log` and
+read the instructions.
+
+
+Programming with the Twitter api classes
+========================================
+
+
+The Twitter and TwitterStream classes are the key to building your own
+Twitter-enabled applications.
+
+
+The Twitter class
+-----------------
+
+The minimalist yet fully featured Twitter API class.
+
+Get RESTful data by accessing members of this class. The result
+is decoded python objects (lists and dicts).
+
+The Twitter API is documented at:
+
+ http://dev.twitter.com/doc
+
+
+Examples::
+
+ twitter = Twitter(
+ auth=OAuth(token, token_key, con_secret, con_secret_key)))
+
+ # Get the public timeline
+ twitter.statuses.public_timeline()
+
+ # Get a particular friend's timeline
+ twitter.statuses.friends_timeline(id="billybob")
+
+ # Also supported (but totally weird)
+ twitter.statuses.friends_timeline.billybob()
+
+ # Send a direct message
+ twitter.direct_messages.new(
+ user="billybob",
+ text="I think yer swell!")
+
+ # Get the members of a particular list of a particular friend
+ twitter.user.listname.members(user="billybob", listname="billysbuds")
+
+
+Searching Twitter::
+
+ twitter_search = Twitter(domain="search.twitter.com")
+
+ # Find the latest search trends
+ twitter_search.trends()
+
+ # Search for the latest News on #gaza
+ twitter_search.search(q="#gaza")
+
+
+Using the data returned
+-----------------------
+
+Twitter API calls return decoded JSON. This is converted into
+a bunch of Python lists, dicts, ints, and strings. For example::
+
+ x = twitter.statuses.public_timeline()
+
+ # The first 'tweet' in the timeline
+ x[0]
+
+ # The screen name of the user who wrote the first 'tweet'
+ x[0]['user']['screen_name']
+
+
+Getting raw XML data
+--------------------
+
+If you prefer to get your Twitter data in XML format, pass
+format="xml" to the Twitter object when you instantiate it::
+
+ twitter = Twitter(format="xml")
+
+The output will not be parsed in any way. It will be a raw string
+of XML.
+
+
+The TwitterStream class
+-----------------------
+
+The TwitterStream object is an interface to the Twitter Stream API
+(stream.twitter.com). This can be used pretty much the same as the
+Twitter class except the result of calling a method will be an
+iterator that yields objects decoded from the stream. For
+example::
+
+ twitter_stream = TwitterStream(auth=UserPassAuth('joe', 'joespassword'))
+ iterator = twitter_stream.statuses.sample()
+
+ for tweet in iterator:
+ ...do something with this tweet...
+
+The iterator will yield tweets forever and ever (until the stream
+breaks at which point it raises a TwitterHTTPError.)
+
+The `block` parameter controls if the stream is blocking. Default
+is blocking (True). When set to False, the iterator will
+occasionally yield None when there is no available message.
+
+Twitter Response Objects
+------------------------
+
+Response from a twitter request. Behaves like a list or a string
+(depending on requested format) but it has a few other interesting
+attributes.
+
+`headers` gives you access to the response headers as an
+httplib.HTTPHeaders instance. You can do
+`response.headers.getheader('h')` to retrieve a header.
+
+Authentication
+--------------
+
+You can authenticate with Twitter in three ways: NoAuth, OAuth, or
+UserPassAuth. Get help() on these classes to learn how to use them.
+
+OAuth is probably the most useful.
+
+
+Working with OAuth
+------------------
+
+Visit the Twitter developer page and create a new application:
+
+ https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
+
+This will get you a CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.
+
+When users run your application they have to authenticate your app
+with their Twitter account. A few HTTP calls to twitter are required
+to do this. Please see the twitter.oauth_dance module to see how this
+is done. If you are making a command-line app, you can use the
+oauth_dance() function directly.
+
+Performing the "oauth dance" gets you an ouath token and oauth secret
+that authenticate the user with Twitter. You should save these for
+later so that the user doesn't have to do the oauth dance again.
+
+read_token_file and write_token_file are utility methods to read and
+write OAuth token and secret key values. The values are stored as
+strings in the file. Not terribly exciting.
+
+Finally, you can use the OAuth authenticator to connect to Twitter. In
+code it all goes like this::
+
+ MY_TWITTER_CREDS = os.path.expanduser('~/.my_app_credentials')
+ if not os.path.exists(MY_TWITTER_CREDS):
+ oauth_dance("My App Name", CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
+ MY_TWITTER_CREDS)
+
+ oauth_token, oauth_secret = read_token_file(MY_TWITTER_CREDS)
+
+ twitter = Twitter(auth=OAuth(
+ oauth_token, oauth_token_secret, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET))
+
+ # Now work with Twitter
+ twitter.statuses.update('Hello, world!')
+
+
+
+License
+=======
+
+Python Twitter Tools are released under an MIT License.
projects / z_archive / twitter.git / blobdiff