A nice way to handle twitter API errors

api_call.py

def make_api_call(self,f,**kwargs):
  if f is None:
    raise ValueError("No function passed in!") 
  response = []
  wait_period = 1
  while True:
    try:
      #your api call
      response = f(**kwargs)
      break
    except twitter.api.TwitterHttpError, e:
      wait_period = self.handle_twitter_error(e,wait_period) #get new wait period
      if wait_period is None: #if its none, we can skip it
        break
  return response

api_error_handler.py

def handle_twitter_error(self,e,wait_period=1):
    if wait_period > 3600:
        logger.error('Too many retries')
        raise e
    if e.e.code == 401:
        logger.warning('Not Authorized To View This Information. Skipping...')
        return None
    elif e.e.code in (502,503):
        logger.warning(str(e.e.code)+' error. Waiting for '+str(wait_period)+' seconds...')
        time.sleep(wait_period)
        return wait_period + 2 #they suggest adding time linearly
    elif e.e.code == 404:
        logger.warning('404 Error. Page not found.')
        return None
    elif self.api.account.rate_limit_status()['remaining_hits'] == 0:
        now = time.time()
        sleep_for = self.api.account.rate_limit_status()['reset_time_in_seconds']-now
        logger.warning('Rate limited. Sleeping for '+str(sleep_for)+' seconds')
        time.sleep(sleep_for)
        return 1 #start over at 1 second wait time
    else:
        logger.error("Uh oh, something bad happened...")
        raise e

example_call.py

#created comma delimited list of first 100 names and ids passed in.
params = {
  'screen_name': ','.join(screen_names[:100]),
  'user_id': ','.join([str(user_id) for user_id in user_ids[:100]])
}

#make the call using api.users.lookup function, this handles all errors
response = self.api_call(f=api.users.lookup,**params)