tweetstream - Simple twitter streaming API

Introduction

tweetstream provides a class, TweetStream, that can be used to get tweets from Twitter's streaming API. An instance of the class can be used as an iterator. In addition to fetching tweets, the object keeps track of the number of tweets collected and the rate at which tweets are received.

Subclasses are available for accessing the "track" and "follow" streams as well.

There's also a ReconnectingTweetStream class that handles automatic reconnecting.

Twitter's documentation about the streaming API can be found here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation .

Note that the API is blocking. If for some reason data is not immediatly available, calls will block until enough data is available to yield a tweet.

Examples

Printing all incomming tweets:

>>> stream = tweetstream.TweetStream("username", "password")
>>> for tweet in stream:
...     print tweet

The stream object can also be used as a context, as in this example that prints the author for each tweet as well as the tweet count and rate:

>>> with tweetstream.TweetStream("username", "password") as stream
...     for tweet in stream:
...         print "Got tweet from %-16s\t( tweet %d, rate %.1f tweets/sec)" % (
...                 tweet["user"]["screen_name"], stream.count, stream.rate )

Stream objects can raise ConnectionError or AuthenticationError exceptions:

>>> try:
...     with tweetstream.TweetStream("username", "password") as stream
...         for tweet in stream:
...             print "Got tweet from %-16s\t( tweet %d, rate %.1f tweets/sec)" % (
...                     tweet["user"]["screen_name"], stream.count, stream.rate )
... except tweetstream.ConnectionError, e:
...     print "Disconnected from twitter. Reason:", e.reason

To get tweets that relate to specific terms, use the TrackStream:

>>> words = ["opera", "firefox", "safari"]
>>> with tweetstream.TrackStream("username", "password", words) as stream
...     for tweet in stream:
...         print "Got interesting tweet:", tweet

To get only tweets from a set of users, use the FollowStream. The following would get tweets for user 1, 42 and 8675309

>>> users = [1, 42, 8675309]
>>> with tweetstream.FollowStream("username", "password", users) as stream
...     for tweet in stream:
...         print "Got  tweet from:", tweet["user"]["screen_name"]

Simple tweet fetcher that sends tweets to an AMQP message server using carrot:

>>> from carrot.messaging import Publisher
>>> from carrot.connection import AMQPConnection
>>> from tweetstream import TweetStream
>>> amqpconn = AMQPConnection(hostname="localhost", port=5672,
...                           userid="test", password="test",
...                           vhost="test")
>>> publisher = Publisher(connection=amqpconn,
...                       exchange="tweets", routing_key="stream")
>>> with TweetStream("username", "password") as stream:
...    for tweet in stream:
...        publisher.send(tweet)
>>> publisher.close()

Changelog

See the CHANGELOG file

Contact

The author is Rune Halvorsen <[email protected]>. The project resides at http://bitbucket.org/runeh/tweetstream . If you find bugs, or have feature requests, please report them in the project site issue tracker. Patches are also very welcome.

License

This software is licensed under the New BSD License. See the LICENCE file in the top distribution directory for the full license text.