Streaming

Twitter offers a Streaming service to retrieve real-time tweets that match a given query or location. This service uses an OAuth1 authentication method which requires both consumer (consumer_key, consumer_secret) and access keys (access_token, access_token_secret) and those keys will be used to authenticate the Twitter App, and so on to access the Streaming service via OAuth1.

As described below, for further details on Twitter Streaming insights please check the following diagram proposed by Twitter on Consuming Streaming Data.

So on, twipper has been created in order to cover Twitter Streaming process to retrieve real-time tweets. The sample usage of twipper when it comes to streaming data will be as it follows:

import twipper

from twipper.streaming import stream_tweets

cred = twipper.Twipper(consumer_key='consumer_key',
                       consumer_secret='consumer_secret',
                       access_token='access_token',
                       access_token_secret='access_token_secret')

tweets = stream_tweets(access=cred,
                       query='cats',
                       language='en',
                       filter_retweets=True,
                       tweet_limit=100,
                       date_limit=None,
                       retry='no_limit')

results = list()

for index, tweet in enumerate(tweets, 1):
    print('Inserting tweet number ' + str(index))
    results.append(tweet)

The previous block of code retrieves up to 100 tweets written in English matching the word cats as specified on the query, filtering out retweets and with an infinite number of tries if the retrieval process fails, until the objective is reached. Later on, as the returned data from the function are yield values inserted into a generator, a for loop is needed in order to store all the available retrieved data on a list. That list will contain a tweet formatted as a JSON object as described by Twitter.

{
    "created_at": "Thu May 10 15:24:15 +0000 2018",
    "id_str": "850006245121695744",
    "text": "Here is the Tweet message.",
    "user": {

    },
    "place": {

    },
    "entities": {

    },
    "extended_entities": {

    }
}

More JSON samples can be found at https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/data-dictionary/overview/intro-to-tweet-json.html.

Note

For further twipper.streaming insights or information please use the streaming API Reference where functions are described and sorted out so to understand its usage and how the params should be formatted in order to execute useful queries and retrieve the desired information from Twitter.