So… I finally got started looking at Python as a programming language. In my job I work with Java, and I never really done any other programming in another language. But I decided to throw myself at Python to see what the hype was all about. The problem with learning a new language, at least in my head, is that I need something to program. I need at specific problem to address. And now that I’m starting to use Twitter more and more, I decided to see what I could do with Python and the Twitter API. Doing some Google searching a found a very simple example of accessing Twitter through the API with Python. I found a guide here: Python/Twitter example I might need to say, that I did this on Ubuntu 9.10. So the first step was installing a python-twitter library:
sudo apt-get install python-twitter
Then I created a
termtwit.py
with Vim, (I prefer Vim for basic text editing), and I basically just copy/pasted the code from the site I linked to above. So the file ended up looking like this:
import twitter
username = "your_username"
password = "your_password"
api = twitter.Api(username=username, password=password)
statuses = api.GetFriendsTimeline(username)
for s in statuses :
print s.user.name.encode("utf-8"), "(", s.user.screen_name, ") :"
print s.text.encode("utf-8")
print
Run the file like this:
python termtwit.py
and It’ll show you the latest updates. So there you have it. Google the twitter API to learn more about the functions…