Twitter API

I’m finding out that the Twitter API has been fairly consistent between Python environments (my home and my work machines – both running Windows 7). However, I’m running into significant issues with twitter data encoding on my work machine. By encoding, I’m talking about which characters are interpretable or printable. In terms of Python IDE, I’m running Canopy at home and Spyder on my work machine.

For collecting Tweets, I have been using Tweepy. There are many other classes available to extract tweets from Twitter’s API, but Tweepy was very easy to install and manage. Like I mentioned above, the problem now is extracting the data from the JSON file created by Tweepy so that it’s available to my work machine. Once I am able to figure out how to extract data on my work machine, I will post the code for both environments.

The picture below has been particularly helpful in extracting data from the Twitter JSON record. It’s a bit dated, but much of the record structure is still true. I found the image from another post by Mike Teczno.

Here is the map of a tweet, published by Raffi Krikorian:

raffi-krikorian-map-of-a-tweet.