.. -*- restructuredtext -*-

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tweetstream - Simple twitter streaming API

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Introduction

------------

tweetstream provides two classes, SampleStream and FollowStream, that can be

used to get tweets from Twitter's streaming API. An instance of one of the

classes can be used as an iterator. In addition to fetching tweets, the 

object keeps track of the number of tweets collected and the rate at which

tweets are received.

SampleStream delivers a sample of all tweets. FilterStream delivers

tweets that match one or more criteria. Note that it's not possible

to get all tweets without access to the "firehose" stream, which

is not currently avaliable to the public.

Twitter's documentation about the streaming API can be found here:

http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api_methods .

**Note** that the API is blocking. If for some reason data is not immediatly

available, calls will block until enough data is available to yield a tweet.

Examples

--------

Printing incoming tweets:

>>> stream = tweetstream.SampleStream("username", "password")

>>> for tweet in stream:

...     print tweet

The stream object can also be used as a context, as in this example that

prints the author for each tweet as well as the tweet count and rate:

>>> with tweetstream.SampleStream("username", "password") as stream

...     for tweet in stream:

...         print "Got tweet from %-16s\t( tweet %d, rate %.1f tweets/sec)" % (

...                 tweet["user"]["screen_name"], stream.count, stream.rate )

Stream objects can raise ConnectionError or AuthenticationError exceptions:

>>> try:

...     with tweetstream.TweetStream("username", "password") as stream

...         for tweet in stream:

...             print "Got tweet from %-16s\t( tweet %d, rate %.1f tweets/sec)" % (

...                     tweet["user"]["screen_name"], stream.count, stream.rate )

... except tweetstream.ConnectionError, e:

...     print "Disconnected from twitter. Reason:", e.reason

To get tweets that match specific criteria, use the FilterStream. FilterStreams

take three keyword arguments: "locations", "follow" and "track".

Locations are a list of bounding boxes in which geotagged tweets should originate.

The argument should be an iterable of longitude/latitude pairs.

Track specifies keywords to track. The argument should be an iterable of

strings.

Follow returns statuses that reference given users. Argument should be an iterable

of twitter user IDs. The IDs are userid ints, not the screen names. 

>>> words = ["opera", "firefox", "safari"]

>>> people = [123,124,125]

>>> locations = ["-122.75,36.8", "-121.75,37.8"]

>>> with tweetstream.FilterStream("username", "password", track=words,

...                               follow=people, locations=locations) as stream

...     for tweet in stream:

...         print "Got interesting tweet:", tweet

Deprecated classes

------------------

tweetstream used to contain the classes TweetStream, FollowStream, TrackStream

LocationStream and ReconnectingTweetStream. These were deprecated when twitter

changed its API end points. The same functionality is now available in

SampleStream and FilterStream. The deprecated methods will emit a warning when

used, but will remain functional for a while longer.

Changelog

---------

See the CHANGELOG file

Contact

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The author is Rune Halvorsen <runefh@gmail.com>. The project resides at

http://bitbucket.org/runeh/tweetstream . If you find bugs, or have feature

requests, please report them in the project site issue tracker. Patches are

also very welcome.

Contributors

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- Rune Halvorsen

- Christopher Schierkolk

License

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This software is licensed under the ``New BSD License``. See the ``LICENCE``

file in the top distribution directory for the full license text.