Twitter provides the Twitter API which can be used by developers to perform all the functions provided by a Twitter client such as update the twitter status, check the home timeline or the public timeline, retweet, update your profile etc.
To access all the twitter functionality, there are already user libraries created in most of the programming languages. You can find these libraries here.
Twitter API consists of three parts: two REST API and a Streaming API. The REST API are used to perform the user functionality like update status, view timeline, etc. The Streaming API are used for search and trend data. This tutorial is an attempt to explain in a simple way how we can use the Twitter REST API. I will be showing three examples for this. All of the other Twitter REST API can be used in a similar way.
I will be using Python 3.1 and the httplib2 library for the HTTP request/response.
1) Check your rate limit in Twitter
Rate limit is the number of times you can access certain twitter API or rather functionality in a particular hour. For example, you can update your twitter status with a rate limit of 150 requests per hour. Any attempt to use more than this will return an error. The rate limit can be based on the user (for authenticated API calls) or on the IP address (for unauthenticated API calls). Twitter allows increase in the rate limit to 20,000 for developers. Find more information about the twitter rate limit here.
The following Python script explains how to use the Twitter Rate Limit API to get the rate limit for the user.
def get_rate_limit(auth): #auth is a dictionary {'username': username, 'password': password}
"""Get the rate limit for the user"""
url = "http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.json" #Twitter API for getting the rate limit (using JSON)
h = httplib2.Http(".cache") #Get the http object (using httplib2)
h.add_credentials(auth['username'], auth['password']) #add the Twitter Basic Authentication (username, password)
resp, content = h.request(url, "GET") #Send the http GET request for the rate limit
if resp.status == 200: #if the GET is successful
str_content = str(content)[2:-1] #Python byte to string conversion with b''. Remove it
rate_limit_info = json.loads(str_content) #Load the Rate Limit Information like remaining, hour limit
return rate_limit_info['remaining_hits'] #Get the remaining hits for the hour
else:
return -1
The rate limit is not applied for using the rate limit twitter API. The rate limit Twitter API should be used to check if we have exceeded it or not before sending any further Twitter requests.
2) Update your Twitter Status
You can update your twitter status by using the Twitter Status API. This API uses a http POST method. So it does not deplete your rate limit as Twitter has set it mainly for the GET methods. However there is still a limit on the number of status updates you can perform in a day. Like the rate limit API, the Status Update API requires user authentication. Note that in Twitter there are two authentication methods available: Basic Authentication and OAuth Authentication. Twitter recommends using OAuth Authentication as this will be used in future versions. But for now it supports both. In this tutorial, I use Basic Authentication for it’s simplicity.
The following Python script explains how to send a Twitter status update.
def update_status(auth, status): #auth is a dictionary {'username': username, 'password': password}
"""Update my twitter status"""
url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json" #Twitter API to update status
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
h.add_credentials(auth['username'], auth['password']) #Twitter Basic Authentication
resp, content = h.request(url, "POST", urllib.parse.urlencode({'status':status})) #Send the status
if resp.status == 200:
print(content)
else:
print('Error')
3) Get your Twitter Home Timeline
The Twitter Home Timeline API will return the status updates for the user, the followers and all of the retweets. You can get the updates based on filters like after a certain ID, before a certain ID, based on the number of updates or based on a particular page you want. Here I read the user home timeline based on the number of updates I want.
The following Python script explains how to get the home timeline for a user.
def get_home_timeline(auth): #auth is a dictionary {'username': username, 'password': password}
"""Get the home timeline for the user"""
url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.json" #Twitter Home Timeline API
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
h.add_credentials(auth['username'], auth['password'])
resp, content = h.request(url, "GET", urllib.parse.urlencode({'count':2})) #Get 2 updates
if resp.status == 200:
str_content = str(content)[2:-1]
str_content = str_content.replace('\\\\"', '') #returned object not JSON serializable
str_content = str_content.replace('\\', '') #So modification to make it JSON serializable
list_content = json.loads(str_content)
print(list_content[0]) #printing one status update
else:
print('Error')
There are many more Twitter API for your use and you can find all of them at the Twitter API website.
Have you developed any stand alone or web based application which uses the Twitter API or the API libraries? Which method of Authentication do you recommend, Basic Authentication or OAuth?
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