Search by twitter handle and keywords using twitter api v1.1

Question

I am trying to use twitter's API v1.1 and the urllib2 library to search for tweets containing certain keywords tweeted by a given user. The code I have tried is:

#!/usr/bin/python

import json
import sys
import urllib2
import os



#input twitter handle
handle = sys.argv[1]

sturl="https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=immigrant%20OR%20illegal%20from%3A"+handle+"&src=typd";

url = urllib2.urlopen(sturl)

#convert the data and load it into json
data = json.load(url)

print len(data), "tweets"

This takes the desired user handle as the input and searches for tweets by this account containing the words "immigrant" or "illegal" and prints the number of such tweets. The error I get is:

  File "tweet_search.py", line 16, in <module>
    url = urllib2.urlopen(sturl)
  File "/Users/David/anaconda/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 154, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/Users/David/anaconda/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 437, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/Users/David/anaconda/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 550, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/Users/David/anaconda/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 475, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/Users/David/anaconda/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 409, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/Users/David/anaconda/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 558, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 400: Bad Request

Am I using the query format incorrectly? I have tried browsing the API documentation and I can't find a query option to search by twitter handle as well as keyword.

PYA PYA · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-14T04:28:07

Well i think your URL is messed up visit

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=immigrant%20OR%20illegal%20from%3Asoccer&src=typd

which is what the url will be when your handle is soccer. you should get this

{"errors":[{"code":215,"message":"Bad Authentication data."}]}

You should look at how exactly the URL should be. You definitely should use API keys or some other auth stuff.

Search by twitter handle and keywords using twitter api v1.1

1 Answers