Category: Twitter API

I wanted to do some research with public tweets using tweepy. Basically what I wanted to do is save all the tweets to my local mysql database instance that met my certain criteria. The criteria / filter was a table I have within my database.

I decided to use tweepy, find it on github  here.

Check out Brandon Wood’s article here where I based this off of.

# twitter client
import tweepy

# database interface
import mysql.connector
conn = mysql.connector.connect(user='root', password='mypass', host='127.0.0.1', database='analytics')
curs = conn.cursor()

class StreamWatcherHandler(tweepy.StreamListener):

 def on_status(self, status):

 
 try:
 usr = status.author.screen_name.strip()
 txt = status.text.strip()
 in_reply_to = status.in_reply_to_status_id
 src = status.source.strip()
 cat = status.created_at

 # Now that we have our tweet information, let's stow it away in our sql database
 curs.execute("insert into tweets (username, created_at, content, reply_to, source) values(%s, %s, %s, %s, %s)", 
 (usr, cat, txt, in_reply_to, src))
 conn.commit()
 except Exception as e:
 # Most errors we're going to see relate to the handling of UTF-8 messages (sorry)
 print(e)

 def on_error(self, status_code):
 print('An error has occured! Status code = %s' % status_code)
 return True

def main():
 # establish stream
 consumer_key = "key"
 consumer_secret = "secret"
 auth1 = tweepy.auth.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)

 access_token = "token"
 access_token_secret = "token_secret"
 auth1.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

#This is where we define our filter from our database. Each cell will contain a keyword that I want the stream to look for 
 curs.execute('SELECT name FROM mytable');
 row = [item[0] for item in curs.fetchall()]

 print "Establishing stream...",
 stream = tweepy.Stream(auth1, StreamWatcherHandler(), timeout=None)
 stream.filter(track=row)
 print "Done"

if __name__ == '__main__':
 try:
 main()
 except KeyboardInterrupt:
 print "Disconnecting from database... ",
 conn.commit()
 conn.close()
 print "Done"

Here is what the database table looks like:

 

So now the stream is only looking for tweets that have “test”, “test2”, or “test3” keywords.