A script to download all of a user's tweets into JSON

tweet_dumper.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8

import tweepy #https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy
import json
import sys

#Twitter API credentials
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""


def get_all_tweets(screen_name):
	# Twitter only allows access to a users most recent 3240 tweets with this method
	
	# authorize twitter, initialize tweepy
	auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
	auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
	api = tweepy.API(auth)
	
	# initialize a list to hold all the tweepy Tweets
	alltweets = []	
	
	# make initial request for most recent tweets (200 is the maximum allowed count)
	new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=199)
	
	# save most recent tweets
	alltweets.extend(new_tweets)
	
	# save the id of the oldest tweet less one
	oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1

	# keep grabbing tweets until there are no tweets left to grab
	while len(new_tweets) > 0:
		
		#all subsiquent requests use the max_id param to prevent duplicates
		new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=199,max_id=oldest)
		
		#save most recent tweets
		alltweets.extend(new_tweets)
		
		#update the id of the oldest tweet less one
		oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1

	# print total tweets fetched from given screen name
	print "Total tweets downloaded from %s are %s" % (screen_name,len(alltweets))
	
	return alltweets

def fetch_tweets(screen_names):

	# initialize the list to hold all tweets from all users
	alltweets=[]

	# get all tweets for each screen name
	for  screen_name in screen_names:
		alltweets.extend(get_all_tweets(screen_name))

	return alltweets

def store_tweets(alltweets,file='tweets.json'):

	# a list of all formatted tweets
	tweet_list=[]

	for tweet in alltweets:

		# a dict to contain information about single tweet
		tweet_information=dict()

		# text of tweet
		tweet_information['text']=tweet.text.encode('utf-8')

		# date and time at which tweet was created
		tweet_information['created_at']=tweet.created_at.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

		# id of this tweet
		tweet_information['id_str']=tweet.id_str

		# retweet count
		tweet_information['retweet_count']=tweet.retweet_count

		# favourites count
		tweet_information['favorite_count']=tweet.favorite_count

		# screename of the user to which it was replied (is Nullable)
		tweet_information['in_reply_to_screen_name']=tweet.in_reply_to_screen_name

		# user information in user dictionery
		user_dictionery=tweet._json['user']

		# no of followers of the user
		tweet_information['followers_count']=user_dictionery['followers_count']

		# screename of the person who tweeted this
		tweet_information['screen_name']=user_dictionery['screen_name']

		


		# add this tweet to the tweet_list
		tweet_list.append(tweet_information)


	# open file desc to output file with write permissions
	file_des=open(file,'wb')

	# dump tweets to the file
	json.dump(tweet_list,file_des,indent=4,sort_keys=True)

	# close the file_des
	file_des.close()


if __name__ == '__main__':
	
	# pass in the username of the account you want to download
	alltweets=get_all_tweets(sys.argv[1])

	# store the data into json file
	if len(sys.argv[2])>0:
		store_tweets(alltweets,sys.argv[2])
	else :
		store_tweets(alltweets)

Im getting error running this code. Is this code correct?

@forts1

• if you got an error at line 48 that's because you need to add parentheses when using the print statement -> print( "Total ...")
• if you got an error at line 120 or 124 (most likely index out of range) that's because you need to pass arguments the first argument is the screen_name of the user and the second is the name of the file (run this from terminal).
• if you got an error at line 111 that's because the file is open in binary mode, remove the 'b' and remove the ".encode" from line 74 since
  this will also cause an error.
  after these edits the code should work :)

amazing it works! thank you. I had to change the following:

line 48
print ("Total tweets downloaded from %s are %s" % (screen_name,len(alltweets)))

line 74
tweet_information['text']=tweet.text

line 108
file_des=open(file,'w', encoding='utf-8')

run the script with the two arguments:
$ python tweet_dumper.py theTwitterUsername tweets.json