Comments on Amy Iris: Twitter Automations with Python Scripts

Sorry, I should have mentioned this is version 2 c...

2009-01-17T08:10:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I should have mentioned this is version 2 code (works on 2.5, as long as I didn't mess it up when I posted it; should work in 2.6.)

I want to emphasize that this is the HARD way to do this, and I was going to follow up with a subsequent post with the easy way.

I think the hard way is easier to understand for new Python programmers. It's just HTML scraping. But clearly using the API is shorter, and is more sanctioned - it takes less server resources from Twitter, and less network resources.

Kumar,

Thanks! I worked thru the urllib2 ...

2009-01-16T12:54:00.000-08:00

Kumar,

Thanks! I worked thru the urllib2 issue, but I don't know enough of Python yet for the other.

Your suggestion to install 2.6 is probably better. I've got several old library books from 1999 - 2004 and have had some problems because of the changes. BTW, like your site!

This code won't work in Python 3.0 as-is. Raw byt...

2009-01-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

This code won't work in Python 3.0 as-is. Raw bytes are a little different and urllib (no longer called urllib2) is different. You can read all about it in http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html or just install Python 2.6 (both can co-exist peacefully).

Well, enough for today. Now I've got an error in ...

2009-01-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

Well, enough for today. Now I've got an error in the 1st f=re.findall line.
Traceback (most recent call last):...
File "D:\Python30\lib\re.py", line 190, in findall
return _compile(pattern, flags).findall(string)
TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object

Okay, please help the newbie.
I using Python3 a...

2009-01-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Okay, please help the newbie.
I using Python3 and do not have the urllib2 module. So where can I get it?

Thanks,

Well, I'm a new Python programmer, still going thr...

2009-01-16T10:36:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm a new Python programmer, still going thru the tutorials. All I can say is WOW! and Thanks!

Kumar-
Thanks for spoiling my next post! :)
2009-01-14T08:30:00.000-08:00
Kumar-
Thanks for spoiling my next post! :)

Yes, Amy Iris uses the Twitter API extensively. She's used the PythonTwitter API software from the Google Code library.

I thought the HTML parsing would be a good, readable example that the new Python programmer could make some sense out of.

Hi Amy, that's a pretty neat idea. I follow a...

2009-01-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

Hi Amy, that's a pretty neat idea. I follow a few automated feeds that mine twitter for music speak. As for your strategy, there is actually an easier way and one that is a bit more "endorsed" by the twitter servers. It's an API you can use to get data instead of HTML which is much easier to parse.

http://dev.twitter.com/2008/10/we-got-data.html
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Search+API+Documentation

Here is a quick example using the simplejson library:

>>> import simplejson, urllib2
>>> f = urllib2.urlopen('http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=python+programming')
>>> d = simplejson.load(f)
>>> d['results'][0]['text']
u'RT @pet3r @M4r14nn4 Decrease in Python programming jobs during recession second smallest of all languages... 1st was Lisp http://bit.ly/Kydj'
>>> d['results'][0]['from_user']
u'QuotdPython'
>>>

have fun!

PS. unfortunately a recession-related post was indeed the first result (I didn't cherry pick that)