使用tweepy获取用户的旧推文

Question

I am trying to gather the tweets of a user navalny , from 01.11.2017 to 31.01.2018 using tweepy . I have ids of the first and last tweets that I need, so I tried the following code:

import tweepy

consumer_key = '' 
consumer_secret = ''
access_token = ''
access_token_secret = ''

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

t = api.user_timeline(screen_name='navalny', since_id = 933000445307518976, max_id = 936533580481814529)

However, the returned value is an empty list.

• What is the problem here?

• Are there any restrictions on the history of tweets that I can get?

• What are possible solutions?

Answer 1

Quick answer: Using Tweepy you can only retrieve the last 3200 tweets from the Twitter REST API for a given user. Unfortunately the tweets you are trying to access are older than this.

Detailed answer: I did a check using the code below:

import tweepy
from tweepy import OAuthHandler


def tweet_check(user):
    """
    Scrapes a users most recent tweets
    """
    # API keys and initial configuration
    consumer_key = ""
    consumer_secret = ""
    access_token = ""
    access_secret = ""
    # Configure authentication
    authorisation = OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    authorisation.set_access_token(access_token, access_secret)
    api = tweepy.API(authorisation)
    # Requests most recent tweets from a users timeline
    tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name=user, count=2, 
                               max_id=936533580481814529)
    for tweet in tweets:
        tid = tweet.id
        print(tid)


twitter_users = ["@navalny"]

for twitter_user in twitter_users:
    tweet_check(twitter_user)

This test returns nothing before 936533580481814529

Using a seperate script I scraped all 3200 tweets, the max Twitter will let you scrape and the youngest tweet id I can find is 943856915536326662

Seems like you have run into Twitter's tweet scraping limit for user timelines here.