Understand Tweepy's Tweets JSON Response (Twitter API)

APIs often return responses in the format of a JSON file. In this tutorial, you will learn how to understand and use Twitter API’s response.

This tutorial is part of the complete guide on the Twitter API with Python.

Getting Started

Before you can use the Twitter API, you will need:

Python Installed. Read How to install Python with Anaconda
Apply for a Twitter Developer Account
Twitter API Credentials (API Keys)
- api_key
- api_secret
- access_token
- access_secret

Authenticate with Tweepy

To authenticate to the Twitter API with Tweepy, use this function.

import tweepy

api_key = "..."
api_secrets = "..."
access_token = "..."
access_secret = "..."

# Authenticate to Twitter
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(api_key,api_secrets)
auth.set_access_token(access_token,access_secret)

api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True, compression=True)

You can now run your first Twitter API call.

Get 200 Tweets from a User Timeline

### Authentication skipped for simplicity. See Step 1 ###

tweets = api.user_timeline(id='ChouinardJC', count=200)
tweets_extended = api.user_timeline(id='ChouinardJC', tweet_mode='extended', count=200)

# Print number of tweets
print(len(tweets))
#200

Show a Tweet’s JSON Response

# Select first Tweet from the Above response.
tweet = tweets[0]
#or
#tweet = tweets_extended[0]

# Show as a JSON
tweet._json

# show attributes of the JSON that you can select.
list(tweet._json.keys())

Parse Tweet’s Json Response

Here we will parse the Tweet’s JSON response and print some data.

# Get Tweet data
print(f'Created at:{tweet.created_at}')
print(f'Tweet id:{tweet.id}')

# Get tweet text
try:
    print(f'Tweet text:{tweet.text}')
except:
    # Get tweet text in extended mode
    print(f'Tweet text:{tweet.full_text}')

# Get tweet status
print(f'Is Retweeted:{tweet.retweeted}')
print(f'Is favorited:{tweet.favorited}')
print(f'Is quote:{tweet.is_quote_status}')

# Get Tweet statistics
print(f'Retweet count:{tweet.retweet_count}')
print(f'Favorite count:{tweet.favorite_count}')

# Get tweet lang
print(f'Tweet lang:{tweet.lang}')

# Get replied to
print(f'In reply to status id:{tweet.in_reply_to_status_id}')
print(f'In reply to user id:{tweet.in_reply_to_user_id}')

Show Entities of a Tweet

You can also extract entities like Hashtags, User Mentions and URLs from a Tweet.

tweet = tweets_extended[0]
print(tweet.entities['hashtags'])
for i in tweet.entities:
    print(f'{i} type is {type(tweet.entities[i])}')
    if not tweet.entities[i]:
        print(f'There are no {i}')
    else:
        for j in tweet.entities[i]:
            print(f'{i} entities are {j}')
            for k,v in j.items():
                print(f'{i}:{k} is {v}')
    print('\n')

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to parse the Twitter API’s JSON response with Python.

5/5 - (2 votes)

Jean-Christophe Chouinard

SEO Strategist at Tripadvisor, ex- Seek (Melbourne, Australia). Specialized in technical SEO. In a quest to programmatic SEO for large organizations through the use of Python, R and machine learning.

Understand Tweepy’s Tweets JSON Response (Twitter API)