Ed's Blog

Search Twitter Public Timeline with Python

This Python function takes a search string as a parameter and returns a dictionary representing the JSON returned by Twitter with your search results from the public timeline. Code requires simplejson. It supports all the parameters as defined by Twitter here.

def search_public_timeline(q, refresh_url=None, **kwargs):
    '''
    Searches the public timeline for the q string. There is no sanity checking
    of the parameters. It's all passed straight to the API. Spec defined here:
    
    http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-Search-API-Method:+search
    
    If you send refresh_url then all parameters are ignored. Example usage:
    
    search_public_timeline('menendez')
    search_public_timeline('menendez', since='2010-04-15')
    
    Ed Menendez - [email protected]
    
    >>> len(search_public_timeline('the')['results']) > 1
    True
    '''
    if not refresh_url:
        parms = {}
        parms['q'] = q
        parms.update(kwargs)
        query_str = '?%s' % urllib.urlencode(parms)
    else:
        query_str = refresh_url
    
    u = 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json%s' % query_str
    
    #user_agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)'
    #headers = {'User-Agent' : user_agent}
    
    req = urllib2.Request(u) #, None, headers
    
    return simplejson.load(urllib2.urlopen(req))