Avoid Twitter API limitation with Tweepy

Question

I saw in some question on Stack Exchange that the limitation can be a function of the number of requests per 15 minutes and depends also on the complexity of the algorithm, except that this is not a complex one.

So I use this code:

import tweepy
import sqlite3
import time

db = sqlite3.connect('data/MyDB.db')

# Get a cursor object
cursor = db.cursor()
cursor.execute('''CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS MyTable(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT, geo TEXT, image TEXT, source TEXT, timestamp TEXT, text TEXT, rt INTEGER)''')
db.commit()

consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
key = ""
secret = ""

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(key, secret)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

search = "#MyHashtag"

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search,
                           q=search,
                           include_entities=True).items():
    while True:
        try:
            cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO MyTable(name, geo, image, source, timestamp, text, rt) VALUES(?,?,?,?,?,?,?)''',(tweet.user.screen_name, str(tweet.geo), tweet.user.profile_image_url, tweet.source, tweet.created_at, tweet.text, tweet.retweet_count))
        except tweepy.TweepError:
                time.sleep(60 * 15)
                continue
        break
db.commit()
db.close()

I always get the Twitter limitation error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "stream.py", line 25, in <module>
    include_entities=True).items():
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/cursor.py", line 153, in next
    self.current_page = self.page_iterator.next()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/cursor.py", line 98, in next
    data = self.method(max_id = max_id, *self.args, **self.kargs)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/binder.py", line 200, in _call
    return method.execute()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/binder.py", line 176, in execute
    raise TweepError(error_msg, resp)
tweepy.error.TweepError: [{'message': 'Rate limit exceeded', 'code': 88}]

Answer 1

For anyone who stumbles upon this on Google, tweepy 3.2+ has additional parameters for the tweepy.api class, in particular:

• wait_on_rate_limit – Whether or not to automatically wait for rate limits to replenish
• wait_on_rate_limit_notify – Whether or not to print a notification when Tweepy is waiting for rate limits to replenish

Setting these flags to True will delegate the waiting to the API instance, which is good enough for most simple use cases.