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)

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