Script to check if a twitter user posted in previous week.

check_if_twitter_user_posted_in_last_7_days.py

#script to see whether a user is 'active' during the previous 7 days
#I had a large list of Twitter users. I wanted to see if they remained 'active' from one week to the next
# active means they posted a message at least once during the previous 7 days
#Requires DeWitt Clinton's "Python-Twitter" api wrapper
# some nice date-handling stuff in here
# In a seperate script, I iterated thru a list of Twitter users, passing each in turn into this script



import twitter     
import AuthDetails #file containing a valid Twitter username/password
import datetime


def main(thisuser):    #gets user from calling script
    api=Authenticate()

    if thisuser.GetStatus()==None:  #means user has never tweeted
        return 3

    else:       
        date=GetLatestTweetDate(thisuser)

        dayssincetweet=AmtDaysSinceTweet(date)
        status1=CheckIfActive(dayssincetweet)
        if status1==1:
           #print thisuser.screen_name
           #print"its active"
        else:
            #print"not active"

        #print str(status1)
        
        return status1      #returns either 'active' or 'notactive'
    

def GetLatestTweetDate(thisuser):

    status=thisuser.GetStatus()   #returns latest tweet obj
    longdate=status.GetCreatedAt()

    #longdate is a string. cut it down to Month+Date+Year...
    date1=longdate[4:10]
    date2=longdate[-4:]

    strshortdate= date1+" "+date2

    #now convert this string into a datetime object using strptime
    shortdate=datetime.datetime.strptime(strshortdate, "%b %d %Y")

    return shortdate    
    
    
    
def AmtDaysSinceTweet(date):
    #todays date
    today=datetime.datetime.today()
    sincetweet=today-date  #returns a datetime.timedelta object(dd, m,s,millisecs...)
    amtdays=int(sincetweet.days)  #amt of days in timedelta
    print amtdays," since tweet\n"
    return amtdays


def CheckIfActive(dayssincetweet):
    #user is 'active' if they've tweeted in past 7 days
    if dayssincetweet>7:
        return 0

    else:
        print"active"
        return 1
    



def Authenticate():
        #authenticate session        
        api=twitter.Api(username=AuthDetails.username, password=AuthDetails.password)
        return api


if __name__ =="__main__":
        main(thisuser)