Ruby on Rails超过Twitter API速率限制

Question

I'm trying to use the Twitter Gem for Ruby/Rails in order to check whether an account exists on Twitter with a certain username.

The problem is that after about 15 username checks, the rate limit is said to be exceeded. I understand that Twitter limits its API calls to ~15 every 15 minutes or so, but is there a way that I can check more than one usernames existence in a call?

Here is the code I am currently using to check the existence

def twitter_user_exists?(handle)
    $client.user(handle)
    true
rescue Twitter::Error::NotFound
    false
end

This executes for every username I have returning true/false based on whether the user exists.

Let me know if more information/code is needed. Thanks.

Answer 1

I took a look around the Twitter gem and didn't see any other calls that would allow multiple users.

If some of the checks are being done multiple times, you could store the result of whether or not an account is valid in the database and then retrieve it from the database if it already exists. This would only be an issue if a user changes their twitter name or removes their account which probably won't happen too often.

Another option is to try to request the HTML version of the Twitter profile and see if that 404s or not. Though it is possible that Twitter will rate limit this or block you.