使用 Python tweepy 查找旧推文

Question

Python 3.9.5

tweepy == 4.10.0

I am trying to get old tweets using tweepy but it does not work well (shows 0 result). Here's what I tried.

BEARER_TOKEN = "My Token"

DATE_STA = "2020-01-01T00:00:01Z"
DATE_END = "2020-06-01T23:59:59Z"

client = tweepy.Client(BEARER_TOKEN, wait_on_rate_limit=True)
user = client.get_user(username="hellopolicy")
res = client.get_users_tweets(
    user.data.id,
    end_time     = DATE_END,
    start_time   = DATE_STA,
    max_results  = 100,
    tweet_fields = ["text", "created_at", "conversation_id", "public_metrics"]
)

print(res)
# Response(data=None, includes={}, errors=[], meta={'result_count': 0})

But if I search it manually from the web with a query (from:hellopolicy since:2020-01-01 until:2020-06-01), I can see many tweets during that period.

This behavior depends on target IDs. Most of them showed all results correctly but the others (1-2 out of 10) showed only a couple of weeks or nothing. Numbers of tweets in the IDs were not the matter.

Why This happens and how can I get all the tweets?

Answer 1

From the get_users_tweets() documentation ( see here ):

Only the 3200 most recent Tweets are available.

So you can not access the user's tweets in this interval if he sent 3 200 tweets since then.

Answer 2

You may not have any results returned due to the limited range of dates that you may scrape with the standard API . As quoted:

The Twitter Search API searches against a sampling of recent Tweets published in the past 7 days.

I have a script that may be useful for scraping older tweets on my GitHub to circumvent this issue. Hope it helps.