Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages. These posts are known as “tweets”. Twitter is known as the social media site for robots. We can use Python for posting the tweets without even opening the website. There is a Python library which is used for accessing the Python API, known as tweepy. Here, we are going to use tweepy for doing the same.
Tweepy is not the native library. You need to install it before using it. Installation is easy when you have pip. In the Terminal or Command Prompt, type the following command to install tweepy.
sudo install pip tweepy
In case you don’t have pip, install it as an external library.
Don’t forget to change the change the application type from “Read only” to “Read and write” in the settings. This given the permission to tweet as well.
After this, go to https://apps.twitter.com/. This is used to create a link between your script and Twitter. In “Keys and Access Tokens” tab, get the Consumer Key (API Key), Consumer Secret (API secret), Access Token and Access Token Secret.
Posting a simple tweet
# importing the module import tweepy # personal details consumer_key ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"consumer_secret ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"access_token ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"access_token_secret ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" # authentication of consumer key and secret auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret) # authentication of access token and secret auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret) api = tweepy.API(auth) # update the status api.update_status(status ="Hello Everyone !") |
This is the simple method which will set the tweet “Hello Everyone!”. This is an easy process and doesn’t hold much any importance in real life. It is integrated into bigger programs for some useful work. We can use for loop to tweet a large number of tweets. For maintaining the time period between any two tweets in the loop, we can use sleep() function from the time module as shown.
time.sleep(600) # waits for 600 seconds |
This was all about posting a text tweet. What if we want to post a tweet with a media file, there is a separate method for that.
Posting a tweet with a media file
Sometimes, a user wants to post a tweet with a media file which is quite simple if we use the website interface. Posting with the help of Python takes some effort. It is same as posting the text-only tweet with just two lines of code addition.
# importing the module import tweepy # personal information consumer_key ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"consumer_secret ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"access_token ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"access_token_secret ="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" # authentication auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret) auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret) api = tweepy.API(auth) tweet ="Text part of the tweet" # toDo image_path ="path of the image" # toDo # to attach the media file status = api.update_with_media(image_path, tweet) api.update_status(status = tweet) |
Please don’t forget to change the Application type as stated above. Without changing it, we can’t have the access to post.
This article is contributed by Rishabh Bansal. If you like Lazyroar and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using write.geeksforgeeks.org or mail your article to review-team@geeksforgeeks.org. See your article appearing on the Lazyroar main page and help other Geeks.
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