spritzer sample code

spritzer.py

import urllib2
import base64
import threading
import Queue
import simplejson as json
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil import parser

# authentication stuff
username = 'username'
password = 'password'
basic = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password))[:-1]

# a queue for holding all the incoming tweets
tweets = Queue.Queue(0)

# a consumer thread
class TweetConsumerThread(threading.Thread):
    
    def run(self):
        # loop forever
        while True:
            # get a tweet from the queue
            tweet = tweets.get()
            # if there was a tweet in the queue
            if tweet:
                # parse the json
                t = json.loads(tweet)
                
                # do whatever you want with the tweet here...
                print '%s -- %s' % (t['id'], t['text'])

# a list of the threads
threads = []

# create 2 threads
for x in xrange(2):
    threads.append(TweetConsumerThread())

# for each thread, set daemon mode to true and start them up
for t in threads:
    t.daemon = True
    t.start()

# create a request for the spritzer 
request = urllib2.Request('http://stream.twitter.com/spritzer.json')

# add some basic auth
request.add_header('Authorization', 'Basic %s' % basic)

# open the request
spritzer = urllib2.urlopen(request)

# for each line in the spritzer handle (since each json tweet is on its own line...)
for tweet in spritzer:
    # simple check for blank lines?
    if len(tweet) > 2:
        # put the tweet in the queue to be handled by the consumer threads
        tweets.put(tweet)

# should never get here, but if it does, go ahead and be nice and close the stream
spritzer.close()