Using tweepy to stream users' timeline and filtered tweets

python twitter tweepy
Blue482 picture Blue482 · Mar 27, 2014 · Viewed 11.1k times · Source

I started exploring tweepy a couple days ago and was able to stream filtered (with keywords) tweets at real time. Now I want to stream not only filtered tweets but also tweets from several specific twitter users. Is this possible by using tweepy? It seems stream.userstream() only fetches real-time tweets from my twitter account NOT from other specific users, right? I have tried it with another twitter account that I created for testing but it does not fetch any new tweets that I tweeted, at all.

But if it works, can I download tweets using stream.userstream() and stream.filter() at the same time? If not then how can I get both filtered tweets and users' real time tweets?

Btw I used the example code from @alexhanna. 

api      = tweepy.API(auth)

def main( mode = 1 ):
follow = []
track  = ['Houston Rockets','Lakers','Chicago Bulls']

listen = SListener(api, 'test')
stream = tweepy.Stream(auth, listen)

try: 
    stream.userstream('NBA','ESPN')
    stream.filter(track = track, follow = follow)

except:
    print "error!"
    stream.disconnect()

Would really appreciate your help! Thanks.

Answer

Luigi picture Luigi · Mar 27, 2014

Try using the .filter(follow="") without .userstream() beforehand. Userstream is only the tweets from the account associated with your application. Here is a (very well-annotated) example.

If you want to get the user's tweets and filtered tweets at the same time you need to make two separate Stream() objects.

Edit: the page I linked to is now dead. The Internet Archive link should remain active indefinitely, but all the relevant information to solving the user's question is already contained within this answer. I have not copied and pasted the example from the linked page as I am not the author of it, and because it is only an example that illustrates the proper use of a Stream listener.

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