Acquire Tweets Older Than 7 Days with Tweepy & Python Libraries

Acquiring tweets that are older than 7 days can be a challenging task for developers. The Tweepy and Python libraries can make this process much easier. If you’re interested in learning how to extract tweets that are beyond the reach of the traditional Twitter API, then this is the article for you.

With Tweepy and Python, you can search for tweets based on various parameters such as keyword, location, user, and date range. This article will show you how to implement these search parameters to retrieve tweets that were sent out more than a week ago. You’ll also discover how to save these tweets into a CSV file for further analysis.

What’s more, we’ll explore the benefits of using Tweepy over the Twitter API. You’ll learn how Tweepy provides greater flexibility when it comes to retrieving historical tweets, and how it enables you to avoid the limitations imposed by the Twitter API. So, if you need a solution to gather tweets that are outside the typical 7-day range, read on!

In conclusion, this article offers a step-by-step guide to using Tweepy and Python libraries to acquire tweets that are old enough to fall outside the scope of the traditional Twitter API. It covers the necessary steps to set up your Twitter API credentials and authentication, create a search function, configure and execute the search, and save the tweets to a CSV file. After reading this piece, you’ll be well-equipped to extract valuable data from far-reaching tweets that otherwise would have been unattainable.

“How Can I Get Tweets Older Than A Week (Using Tweepy Or Other Python Libraries)” ~ bbaz

Introduction

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, with over 330 million monthly active users. Twitter provides an API to access its content for software developers to extract and analyze the data. By using the Tweep library, we can collect tweets from the Twitter API.

Python Libraries for Acquiring Tweets Older Than 7 Days

Python programming language is a powerful tool for data processing, analysis, and visualization. The following libraries can be used to acquire tweets older than seven days:

Library Name	Description
Tweepy	A Python library used for accessing the Twitter API and acquiring tweets that are up to seven days old.
TwitterSearch	A Python library used to acquire tweets up to seven days old as well.

While both libraries can be used to acquire tweets, we will focus on using Tweepy to extract tweets older than seven days.

Acquiring Tweets Older Than 7 Days with Tweepy

The first step to using Tweepy is to create a developer account on Twitter’s developer platform. Once you have created an account, you should create a new application and obtain consumer keys, access tokens, and secrets. After acquiring these credentials, install the Tweepy library by running the following command:

!pip install tweepy

Setting up the Authorization

Before making requests to the Twitter API, you need to authorize Tweepy with your Twitter account. In the authorization process, you will use consumer keys, access tokens, and secrets.

“`pythonimport tweepyconsumer_key = ‘your-consumer-key’consumer_secret = ‘your-consumer-secret’access_token = ‘your-access-token’access_token_secret = ‘your-access-token-secret’auth = tweepy.OAuth1UserHandler( consumer_key=consumer_key, consumer_secret=consumer_secret, access_token=access_token, access_token_secret=access_token_secret)“`

Searching for Tweets with Tweepy

After successfully setting up the authorization, you can use the search method to extract tweets from Twitter’s API. The search syntax requires you to know at least one keyword string or hashtag that you want to search for. The search method accepts several parameters, among which are q for the search query and count for the number of tweets to retrieve. Here is a code snippet showing how to extract tweets based on a keyword:

“`pythonimport tweepyconsumer_key = ‘your-consumer-key’consumer_secret = ‘your-consumer-secret’access_token = ‘your-access-token’access_token_secret = ‘your-access-token-secret’auth = tweepy.OAuth1UserHandler( consumer_key=consumer_key, consumer_secret=consumer_secret, access_token=access_token, access_token_secret=access_token_secret)api = tweepy.API(auth)query = ‘covid-19’tweets = tweepy.Cursor(api.search_tweets, q=query, lang=’en’, since_id=None, max_id=None, tweet_mode=’extended’, include_entities=False).items(1000)for tweet in tweets: print(tweet.full_text)“`

Comparison Table

The following comparison table shows a comparison between Tweepy and TwitterSearch libraries.

Library Name	API Access	Maximum Age of Tweets	Max Number of Returns per Request
Tweepy	Yes	7 Days	100 tweets per request
TwitterSearch	Yes	7 Days	30 tweets per request

Conclusion

Acquiring tweets older than seven days with Python is an essential step in social media analysis. By using the Tweepy library, we can quickly retrieve tweets from the Twitter API. However, it is crucial to note that Tweepy can only retrieve tweets up to seven days old, which limits its capabilities. The Python programming language has several other libraries for social media data analysis, and choosing the correct library depends on your needs.

Thank you for taking the time to read our blog post about acquiring tweets older than seven days with Tweepy and Python libraries. We hope that you found it informative and insightful.

If you are interested in working with Twitter data, then Tweepy is an excellent choice of library to use. It provides a simple and intuitive way to interact with the Twitter API, allowing you to extract information from tweets, users, and more.

Python, on the other hand, is a powerful language that is widely used in the data science community. It allows you to manipulate data in many different ways, making it an ideal choice for working with Twitter data. By combining Tweepy with Python, you can easily acquire and analyze tweets that are older than seven days, opening up a whole new range of possibilities when it comes to understanding what people are talking about on Twitter.

We hope that this blog post has inspired you to explore Tweepy and Python further and to experiment with collecting and analyzing Twitter data yourself. If you have any questions or comments about the article, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below. Thanks again for reading!

Here are some commonly asked questions about using Tweepy and Python Libraries to acquire tweets older than 7 days:

1. What is Tweepy?

   Tweepy is a Python library for accessing Twitter’s API. It provides an easy-to-use interface for interacting with Twitter data, including retrieving tweets, followers, timelines, and more.

2. Why do I need to use Tweepy to acquire tweets older than 7 days?

   Twitter’s API only allows access to tweets from the past 7 days through its standard search API. In order to access older tweets, you need to use Tweepy and specific libraries that can search through the Twitter archive.

3. What Python Libraries do I need to acquire tweets older than 7 days?

   You will need to use the following Python libraries to access older tweets:

   • tweepy
   • datetime
   • pandas
   • matplotlib (optional)

4. How do I authenticate my Tweepy credentials?

   You will need to create a Twitter Developer Account and generate authentication keys and tokens. Once you have these, you can use the following code to authenticate your credentials:

   import tweepyconsumer_key = your_consumer_keyconsumer_secret = your_consumer_secretaccess_token = your_access_tokenaccess_token_secret = your_access_token_secretauth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)api = tweepy.API(auth)

5. How do I acquire tweets older than 7 days using Tweepy?

   You can use Tweepy and the datetime library to search for tweets within a specific date range. Here is an example code:

   import tweepyimport datetime as dtimport pandas as pdconsumer_key = your_consumer_keyconsumer_secret = your_consumer_secretaccess_token = your_access_tokenaccess_token_secret = your_access_token_secretauth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)api = tweepy.API(auth)start_date = dt.datetime(2021, 1, 1)end_date = dt.datetime(2021, 1, 31)tweets = []for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search_tweets, q='your_search_query', lang=en, since_id=start_date.date(), until_id=end_date.date(), tweet_mode='extended').items():    tweets.append(tweet)df = pd.DataFrame({    'id': [tweet.id for tweet in tweets],    'created_at': [tweet.created_at for tweet in tweets],    'full_text': [tweet.full_text for tweet in tweets],    'user': [tweet.user.screen_name for tweet in tweets]})print(df.head())

6. Can I visualize the data using Python Libraries?

   Yes, you can use the matplotlib library to create visualizations of your Twitter data. Here is an example code:

   import matplotlib.pyplot as pltdf['created_at'].value_counts().plot(kind='barh')plt.title('Tweets by Date')plt.xlabel('Number of Tweets')plt.ylabel('Date')plt.show()