Lecture Note
University
University of California San DiegoCourse
DSC 207R | Python for Data SciencePages
2
Academic year
15
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Access the Twitter API In this session, we'll look into Twitter's web data API for accessing Tweets and using Python to analyze the data. You may learn how to access the Twitter API, develop a Twitterapplication, download authentication credentials, and save them to disk for later use byreading this article. This essay makes the assumption that you are familiar with APIs andhave a basic understanding of Python programming. How to Analyze Tweets Using Twitter's Web Data API in Python What is the Twitter API? Developers can access all Tweets on Twitter's website by using the Web Application Programming Interface (API) that Twitter makes available. Via this API, we may query Twitterfor information about a variety of topics, learn about trends and user interactions, and carryout a wide range of additional analysis tasks using Twitter data. Authentication on Twitter To use the Twitter API, authentication is required. Please create a Twitter account if you don't have one and then create an app that identifies all the requests we send to theplatform. To do this, please follow the link provided in the URL and create a sampleapplication. Once you have created a new application, it will give you links to follow. Forexample, when you're in the application settings, please click "Manage Keys and AccessTokens" next to your consumer key. You have to follow the links until this point probably.There, you need to follow one more link to create your consumer key, consumer secretaccess token, and access token secret. Create Twitter Application You will require your Twitter account to finish the procedure once you have generated your sample application. It will provide links for you to click in the application settings once you'vebuilt a new application. To manage keys and access tokens, please click the link that is likelyadjacent to the consumer key. To create your consumer key, consumer secret, access token,and access token secret, click on the links provided. To begin with the following video andour notebook, please find the Twitter notebook in week eight after you've finished thepreceding step. Access Tokens for Twitter To make requests to the Twitter API, we first need to access tokens for Twitter's standard authentication mechanism. If you haven't done this yet, please follow the link provided andcreate a sample application. Once you create a new application, it will give you links to follow
in the application settings. Please click "Manage Keys and Access Tokens" next to theconsumer key. You need to follow the links to create your consumer key, consumer secretaccess token, and access token secret. Now that you have them, please copy and pastethose into the code block below. You only need to do this once, and this file,"secret_twitter_credentials.pkl", will enable you to authenticate with the Twitter API to accessthe data we need for this notebook. Using Pickle to Store Credentials We will be using a Python utility module called "pickle" to store your credentials in a file called "secret_twitter_credentials.pkl". Once you have completed this step, please removeyour credentials from the notebook and do not share that file with anyone. Code Block Explanation We're establishing an object named Twitter and utilizing it to store our login information in the code block that comes after. The Twitter object houses access tokens, customer secret,and consumer key. If the pickled credentials are already there, it will simply load them intothe Twitter object. Objects can be serialized and deserialized using the Python utility modulePickle. You can do this to save objects in files and then load them back into memory asnecessary. Conclusion In this article, we have learned about how to use Twitter's web data API to access Tweets and perform some analysis on the data using Python.
Access the Twitter API
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