How can I get tweets older than a week (using tweepy or other python libraries)

MustiHakan picture MustiHakan · Jun 13, 2014 · Viewed 62.6k times · Source

I have been trying to figure this out but this is a really frustrating. I'm trying to get tweets with a certain hashtag (a great amount of tweets) using Tweepy. But this doesn't go back more than one week. I need to go back at least two years for a period of a couple of months. Is this even possible, if so how?

Just for the check here is my code

import tweepy
import csv

consumer_key = '####'
consumer_secret = '####'
access_token = '####'
access_token_secret = '####'

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

# Open/Create a file to append data
csvFile = open('tweets.csv', 'a')
#Use csv Writer
csvWriter = csv.writer(csvFile)


for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search,q="#ps4",count=100,\
                           lang="en",\
                           since_id=2014-06-12).items():
    print tweet.created_at, tweet.text
    csvWriter.writerow([tweet.created_at, tweet.text.encode('utf-8')])

Answer

As you have noticed Twitter API has some limitations, I have implemented a code that do this using the same strategy as Twitter running over a browser. Take a look, you can get the oldest tweets: https://github.com/Jefferson-Henrique/GetOldTweets-python